Fatelessness

THREE

The next day I had a slightly odd experience. I got up that morning and set off for work as usual. It promised to be a hot day, and as ever the bus was packed with passengers. We had already left the houses of the suburbs behind and driven across the short, unornamented bridge that crosses to Csepel Island, after which the road carries on through open country for a stretch, between fields with, over on the left, a flat, hangarlike building and, over on the right, the scattered greenhouses of market gardeners, when the bus braked very suddenly, and then I heard from outside snatches of a voice issuing orders, which the conductor and several passengers relayed on down to me, to the effect that any Jewish passenger who happened to be on the bus should get off. Ah well, I thought to myself, no doubt they want to do a spot-check on the papers of everyone going across.

Indeed, on the highway I found myself face-to-face with a policeman. Without a word being said, I immediately held out my pass toward him. He, however, first sent the bus on its way with a brisk flip of the hand. I was beginning to think that maybe he didn’t understand the ID, and was just on the point of explaining to him that, as he could see, I am assigned to war work and most certainly could not afford to have my time wasted, when all at once the road around me was thronged with voices and boys, my companions from Shell. They had emerged from hiding behind the embankment. It turned out that the policeman had already grabbed them off earlier buses, and they were killing themselves with laughter that I too had turned up. Even the policeman cracked a bit of a smile, like someone who, though more detached, was still joining in the fun to a degree; I could see straightaway that he had nothing against us — nor indeed could he have, naturally. I asked the other boys what it was all about anyway, but they didn’t have a clue either for the time being.

The policeman then stopped all subsequent buses running from the city by stepping into their path, from a certain distance away, with a hand upstretched; before that he sent the rest of us behind the embankment. Each and every time, the same scene would be reenacted: the initial surprise of the new boys eventually shifting into laughter. The policeman appeared to be satisfied. Roughly a quarter of an hour passed like this. It was a clear summer morning with the sun already starting to warm the grass, as we could feel when we lay down against it. The fat tanks of the oil plant could readily be made out farther away, amid a bluish haze. Beyond that were factory chimneys and yet farther off, more hazily, the pointed outline of some church steeple. The boys, singly or in groups, turned up one after the other from the buses. One of these arrivals was a popular, very chirpy, freckled kid, his hair cropped in black spikes, “Leatherware” as everyone calls him, because unlike the others, who mostly come from various schools, he has gone into that trade. Then there was “Smoker,” a boy you almost never saw without a cigarette. Admittedly, most of the others have the occasional smoke and, not to be outdone, I’ve recently been trying it out myself, but I’ve noticed that he panders to the habit quite differently, with a hunger that verges on the truly feverish. Even his eyes have a strange, febrile expression. He’s more one of those taciturn, somehow none too sociable types, and is not generally liked by the others. All the same, I once asked him what he found so great about smoking so much, to which he gave the curt reply, “It’s cheaper than food.” I was slightly taken aback, since such a reason would never have occurred to me. What surprised me even more, though, was the sort of sarcastic, somehow almost censorious look he had when he noticed my discomfiture; it was disagreeable, so I laid off any further probing. Still, I now better appreciated the guardedness the others showed toward him. By then, another arrival was being greeted with a more unconstrained whooping: he’s the one known to all his closer pals simply as “Fancyman.” That name seemed to me to fit him to a T, given his sleek, dark hair, his big, gray eyes, and the congenial polish of his entire being in general; only later did I hear that the expression actually has quite another meaning, which was why it had been bestowed on him, since back at home he was reputedly very slick in his dealings with girls. One of the buses brought “Rosie” as well — Rosenfeld actually, but everyone uses the shorter nickname. For some reason, he enjoys a degree of respect among the boys, and on matters of common interest we generally tend to go along with his view; he’s also always the one who deals with the foreman as our representative. I’ve heard that he is going through commercial college. With his intelligent, though somewhat excessively elongated face, his wavy blonde hair, and his slightly hard-set, watery-blue eyes, he reminds me of old-master paintings in museums that have titles like “The Infante with Greyhound” and such. Another who turned up was Moskovics, a diminutive kid, with a much more lopsided and what I would call rather ugly mug, the goggles perched on his broad snub nose having pebble lenses as thick as my grandma’s… and likewise all the others. The general opinion, which was more or less the way I saw it, was that the whole affair was a bit unusual but undoubtedly some kind of mistake. “Rosie,” having been egged on by some of the others, even asked the policeman if we would get into trouble for turning up late for work, and when in fact he intended to let us go on about our business. The policeman was not in the least put out by the question, but then again he replied that it was not up to him to decide. As became clear, he really knew very little more than we did: he referred to “further orders” that would replace the older ones, which were to the effect that until then, for the time being, both he and we would have to wait — that was roughly how he explained it. Even if this was not entirely clear, in essence it all sounded, as the boys and I thought, quite reasonable. In any case, we were obligated to defer to the policeman, after all. Then again, we found this all the easier in that quite understandably, safe in the knowledge of our ID cards and the stamp of the war industry authorities, we saw no reason for taking the policeman very seriously. He, for his part, could see — so it emerged from his own words — that he was dealing with “intelligent boys” on whose “sense of discipline,” he added, he could hopefully continue to count; as far as I could see, he had decided he liked us. He himself seemed sympathetic: he was a fairly short policeman, neither young nor old, with clear, very pale eyes set in a sun-tanned face. From a number of the words he used, I deduced he must have come from a rural background.

It was seven o’clock; by now the day shift would be starting in the oil works. The buses were no longer bringing any new boys, and the policeman now asked if any of us were missing. “Rosie” counted us and reported that we were all present. The policeman reckoned it would be better if we didn’t hang around there, by the side of the road. He seemed troubled, and I somehow had the impression that he had been just as little prepared for us as we were for him. He even asked, “Now what am I going to do with you guys?” However, there wasn’t much we could do to help him on that, of course. We gathered around him exuberantly, giggling, as if he were a teacher on some school excursion, with him in the middle of our group, pensively stroking his chin. In the end, he proposed we go to the customs post.

We accompanied him over to a solitary, shabby, single-story building close by, next to the highway; this was the “Customs House,” as a weather-beaten inscription on the front also declared. The policeman produced a bunch of keys and picked out from the many jingling keys the one that fit the lock. Inside we found a pleasantly cool and spacious, though somewhat bare, room furnished with a few benches and a long, rickety table. The policeman also opened the door to a considerably smaller office room of sorts. As best I could see past the gap left by the door, inside were a carpet and a writing desk with a telephone handset on it. We even heard the policeman making a brief call. Though one could not make out what he said, I suppose he must have been trying to hurry the orders along, because when he came out, carefully locking the door behind him, he said, “Nothing. Too bad, we’ll just have to wait.” He urged us to make ourselves comfortable. He even asked if we knew any party games. One boy—“Leatherware,” as far as I recollect — suggested paper, scissors, stone. The policeman, however, was not too keen on that, saying that he had expected better of “such bright kids” like us. For a while he swapped jokes with us, though meanwhile I had the feeling that he was striving at all costs to keep us amused somehow, maybe so we would have no time for any of the unruliness that he had already mentioned out on the highway; but then he proved fairly out of his depth with that sort of thing. Before long, indeed, he left us to our own devices, having noted that he had work to attend to. As he went out we heard him locking the door on us from outside.

There is not much I could tell about what ensued. It seemed we were in for a long wait for the orders. Still, as far as we were concerned, we didn’t look on this as the least bit urgent; after all, we were not frittering away our own time. We all agreed it was nicer here, in the cool, than to be sweating at work. There was little shade to be had at the oil plant. “Rosie” had even managed to wangle the foreman’s permission for us to strip off our shirts. This did not exactly conform with the letter of the regulations, it’s true, since it meant the yellow stars would not be visible on us, but the foreman agreed all the same, out of common decency. The only one to suffer a bit had been Moskovics with his paper-white skin, as his back had turned red as a lobster in the blink of an eye, and we had a big laugh at the long tatters of skin that he peeled off it afterward.

So we settled down on the benches or on the bare earth of the customs post, but I would find it hard to say exactly how we spent the time. Certainly, plenty of jokes were cracked, cigarettes were brought out, and then, as time went on, packed lunches. The foreman was not forgotten either, with people remarking that he must have been a bit mystified this morning when we didn’t turn up for work. Some horseshoe nails were also produced for a game of jacks. It was there, among the boys, that I learned how that goes: each player throws a nail up in the air and the winner is the one who can snatch the most from the nails still in front of him in the time it takes to catch the first nail. “Fancyman,” with his slim hands and long fingers, won every round. “Rosie,” for his part, taught us a song, which we warbled through several times over. The curious thing about the song was that the lyrics can be rendered in three languages using exactly the same words: by sticking an es at the end of the words, it sounds German; an io, then Italian; and taki, then Japanese. All this stuff was just silly, of course, but it kept me entertained.

After that I took a look at each of the grown-ups as they came in. They too had been rounded up by the policemen from the buses in just the same way as us. That, in fact, is how I realized that when he was not with us, he was out on the highway, engaged in the same pursuit as in the morning. One by one, there must have been seven or eight of them who were collected that way, all men. I could see, however, that they were giving the policeman a tougher time, with their expressions of bewilderment, shaking of heads, explanations, showing of documents, and nitpicking questions. They pumped us too: Who and what were we? Later, though, they tended to keep to themselves; we gave up a couple of the benches for them, and they huddled on or hung around these. They talked about all sorts of things, but I didn’t pay much attention. They attempted mainly to figure out what could be behind the policeman’s action, and what consequences the episode might have for them; from what I could hear, though, there were about as many different views as there were men. On the whole, as far as I could tell, it depended mainly on what sort of documents they had on them, because as best I could make out, they too all had some paper giving them leave to head for Csepel, some on private business, others — just like us — out of public duty.

I did, however, take note of a few more interesting faces among them. One of them, I noticed, did not join in the conversation, for instance, but instead merely read a book that, it seems, he just happened to have with him. He was a very tall, gaunt guy in a yellow windbreaker, with a sharp slit of a mouth stretching between two deep, ill-tempered-looking furrows in his bristly face. He had chosen a place for himself at the very end of one of the benches, beside the window, legs crossed and back to the others; it was that, perhaps, which reminded me somewhat of a traveler who is so used to railway compartments that he considers every word, query, or the habitual introductory chitchat that accidental travel companions exchange a waste of time, enduring the wait until the destination is reached with bored indifference— that at least was the kind of impression he gave me.

A somewhat older, elegant-looking man with silvered temples and a bald spot on the crown of his head caught my attention the moment he arrived, not long before noon, because he was highly indignant as the policeman ushered him in. He even asked if there was a telephone that “he might make use of.” The policeman made it clear, however, that he was very sorry but the device “is reserved purely for official purposes,” at which the man fell silent, an angry scowl on his face. Later on, from the answers, laconic though they were, that he gave to inquiries from the others, I gathered that he, like us, also belonged to one of the Csepel manufacturing establishments; he styled himself “an expert,” without going into further details. Otherwise he came across as very self-confident and, as far as I could tell, his take on things must have been similar to ours by and large, except that he seemed to be offended at being detained. I noticed that he was invariably disparaging, even somewhat contemptuous, in his pronouncements about the policeman. He said that the policeman, in his view, “may have some general instruction, it appears,” that he was probably “executing overzealously.” He reckoned, though, that obviously “the competent authorities” would eventually act on the matter, adding that he hoped that was going to be soon. I heard little more from him after that, indeed forgot all about him. It was only getting into the afternoon that he fleetingly attracted my attention again, but by then I was tired too and noticed little more than how impatient he must be, now sitting down, now standing up, now folding his arms over his chest, now clasping them behind his back, now checking his watch.

Then there was also an odd little guy with a very distinctive nose, a large rucksack, dressed in “plus fours” and huge walking boots; even his yellow star somehow seemed larger than usual. He was more of a worrier, moaning especially to everyone about his “bad luck.” I more or less registered his case, since it was a simple story and he went over it repeatedly. He was meant to be visiting his “very sick” mother in the Csepel district, as he related it. He had procured a special permit from the authorities; he had it on him and showed it around. The permit was valid for today up till 2:00 p.m. Something had come up, however, a matter that, he said, “could not be put off”—“for business reasons,” he added. There had been others in the office, however, so it had taken a very long time before it was his turn. He was by then beginning to think the whole trip was in jeopardy, as he put it. Still, he had hurriedly boarded a streetcar in order to get to the bus terminus, in accordance with his original plan. On the way, though, he had checked the likely duration of the return journey against the permitted deadline and worked out that it would, indeed, be rather risky to set off. But then at the bus terminus he had seen that the noon bus was still waiting there, at which, so we were informed, he thought, “What a lot of trouble I’ve gone to for that little bit of paper!… Besides which,” he added, “poor Mama is waiting.” He remarked that the old lady was a big concern for him and his wife. They had long ago pleaded with her to move in with them, into the city, but his mama had kept on flatly refusing until it was too late. He shook his head a lot, being of the opinion that, in his view, the old lady was hanging on to her house “at all costs.” “Yet it doesn’t even have any amenities,” he noted. But then, he went on, she was his mother, so he had to be tolerant. On top of which, he added, she was now both ill and elderly. He had felt “he might never be able to forgive himself,” he said, if he were to pass up this one opportunity. As a result, he had got onto the bus after all. At that point he fell silent for a minute. He raised, then slowly lowered, his hands in a gesture of helplessness, while a thousand tiny quizzical wrinkles formed on his brow, giving him something of the look of a sad, trapped rodent. “What do you think?” he then asked the others. Might something unpleasant come of the business? Would it be taken into consideration that his overstepping of the permitted deadline had not been his fault? And what, he wondered, must his mama be thinking, whom he had informed about the visit, not to speak of his wife and two small children at home if he failed to get back by two o’clock? Mainly from the direction in which his gaze was pointed, it seemed, as far as I could tell, that he was expecting an opinion or rejoinder on these questions from the aforesaid man with the distinguished bearing, the “Expert.” The latter, however, I could see, was not paying much attention; his hand just then was holding a cigarette that he had taken out shortly before, the tip of which he was now tapping on the lid of a gleaming silver case with embossed lettering and engraved lines. I saw from his face that he was absorbed, lost in some distant reflection, giving every sign that he had heard nothing at all of the entire story. At that point, then, the man reverted to his bad luck; if he had reached the terminus just five minutes later, he would not have caught the noon bus, for if he had not found that one still there, he would not have waited for the next, and consequently, assuming this was all through “the difference of just five minutes,” then “he would now not be sitting here but at home,” he explained over and over again.

Then too I still recall the man with the seal’s face: portly, stocky, with a black moustache and gold-rimmed eyeglasses, who was continually seeking “to have a word” with the policeman. Nor did it escape my attention that he always strove to have a go at this separately, a little bit away from the rest, preferably in a corner or by the door. “Constable,” I would hear his strangled, rasping voice at these times, “may I have a word with you?” Or: “Please, constable… just a word, if I may…” In the end, on one occasion the policeman actually asked what he wanted. He then appeared to hesitate, first mistrustfully flashing his spectacles around rapidly. Even though this time they were in the corner of the room quite close to me, I could pick out nothing at all from the ensuing muffled muttering: he was apparently proposing something. A bit later a treacly smile of a more confidential nature also materialized on his features. At the same time, he began to lean just a little closer, until bit by bit, he was right over toward the policeman. In the meantime, as all this was going on, I also observed him make a strange movement. I did not get an entirely clear impression of the thing; at first I thought he was preparing to slip his hand into his inside pocket for something. It even occurred to me, from the evident significance of the movement, that he might be wishing to show an important paper, some remarkable or special document. Only I waited in vain for what might emerge, because in the end he did not complete the movement. All the same, he did not exactly abandon it either, but rather became stalled in it, forgot about it, suddenly somehow aborted it, I might say, just at the climactic moment. As it was, in the end his hand merely fumbled, brushed, and scrabbled for a moment in the general area of his chest, like some big, sparsely haired spider or, even more, some kind of smaller sea monster that was, as it were, seeking the crevice that would allow it to scuttle under the jacket. While that was going on, he himself kept talking, with that particular smile frozen to his face. All this lasted maybe several seconds. After that all I saw was the policeman putting an end to the conversation there and then, very brusquely and with conspicuous decisiveness, even to some extent indignantly, as far as I could see; although I really didn’t get much of what it was all about, his behavior struck me too as somehow fishy, in some not readily definable way.

As for the other faces and incidents, I no longer recall much. In any case, as time went by any observations of this kind that I made became increasingly vague. All I can really say is that the policeman continued to be very considerate toward us boys; with the adults, on the other hand, or so I observed, it seemed as if he was just a touch less cordial. By the afternoon, though, he too looked exhausted. By then he would often cool off among us or in his room, paying no attention to any buses that went by in the meantime. I also heard him repeatedly trying the telephone, and every now and then he would even announce the outcome: “Still nothing,” but with an almost plainly visible expression of dissatisfaction on his face. There was another incident that I also recall. It happened earlier on, sometime after noon, with one of his pals, another policeman who came by on a bicycle. First of all, he propped the latter against the wall where we were; they then carefully closeted themselves in our policeman’s room. It was a long time before they emerged. On parting, there was a lengthy shaking of hands in the doorway. They said nothing, but the way they kept nodding their heads and exchanging glances was something I’d sometimes seen with tradesmen in the old days, back in my father’s office, after they’d chewed over the hard times and the sluggishness of business. I realized, of course, that this was not very likely to be the case with policemen, but still, that is the memory their faces conjured up in my mind, that same familiar, somewhat harassed dejection, that same forced sense of resignation so to say, over the immutable order of things. But I was starting to grow tired; all I remember of the remaining time thereafter is that I felt hot, was bored, and even grew a bit drowsy.

All in all, I can report, the day came and went. The order eventually came through, at round about four o’clock, exactly as the policeman had promised. It said that we were to make our way to the “higher authority” for purposes of showing our documents, so the policeman informed us. He, for his part, must have been notified by telephone because prior to that we had heard bustling noises, indicative of a change of some sort, coming from his room: repeated, peremptory ringing of the apparatus, then he in turn sought to be put through to somewhere to dispatch a few terse pieces of business. The policeman also volunteered that although they had communicated nothing absolutely specific to him either, in his view it could be no more than some kind of cursory formality, at least in cases that were as clear-cut and incontestable in the eyes of the law as, for instance, ours were.

Columns, drawn up in ranks of three abreast, set off back toward the city from all the border posts in the area simultaneously, as I was able to establish while we were en route, for at the bridge and at one turnoff or crossroad or another we would meet up with other groups that were similarly made up of a smaller or larger bunch of yellow-star men and one or two — indeed in one case three — policemen. I spotted the policeman with the bicycle too, accompanying one of those groups. I also noticed that on each occasion the policemen invariably greeted one another with the same certain, so to say businesslike briskness, as though they had reckoned on these encounters in advance, and only then did I grasp more clearly the significance of our own policeman’s previous phone transactions: it seems that was how they had been able to synchronize the time-points with one another. Finally, it hit me that I was marching in the middle of what was by now a quite sizable column, with our procession flanked on both sides, at sporadic intervals, by policemen.

We proceeded in this manner, spread over the entire road, for quite a long while. It was a fine, clear, summery afternoon, the streets thronged with a motley multitude, as they always are at this hour, but I only saw all this in a haze. I also lost my sense of bearings rather quickly, since we mostly traversed streets and avenues with which I was not all that familiar. Then too my attention was rather taken up and quickly sapped by the ever-growing sea of people, the traffic and, above all, the kind of laboredness that goes together with the progress of a closed column in such circumstances. All I remember of the entire long trek, in fact, was the kind of hasty, hesitant, almost furtive curiosity of the public on the sidewalks at the sight of our procession (this was initially amusing, but after a time I no longer paid much notice to it) — oh, and a subsequent, somewhat disturbing moment. We happened to be going along some broad, tremendously busy avenue in the suburbs, with the honking, unbearably noisy din of traffic all around us, when at one point, I don’t know how, a streetcar managed to become wedged in our column, not far in front of me as it happened. We were obliged to come to a halt while it passed through, and it was then that I became alive to the sudden flash of a piece of yellow clothing up ahead, in the cloud of dust, noise, and vehicle exhaust fumes: it was “Traveler.” A single long leap, and he was off to the side, lost somewhere in the seething eddy of machines and humanity. I was totally dumbfounded; somehow it did not tally with his conduct at the customs post, as I saw it. But there was also something else that I felt, a sense of happy surprise I might call it, at the simplicity of an action; indeed, I saw one or two enterprising spirits then immediately make a break for it in his wake, right up ahead. I myself took a look around, though more for the fun of it, if I may put it that way, since I saw no other reason to bolt, though I believe there would have been time to do so; nevertheless, my sense of honor proved the stronger. The policemen took immediate action after that, and the ranks again closed around me.

We went on for a while longer, after which everything happened very quickly, unexpectedly, and in a slightly astonishing fashion. We turned off somewhere and, as best I could see, we had arrived, because the road carried on between the wide-open wings of a gateway. I then noticed that from the gate onward a different set of men stepped into the places of the policemen on our flanks, in much the same uniforms as soldiers but with multicolored feathers in their peaked caps: these were gendarmes. They led us on into a maze of gray buildings, ever farther inward, before we suddenly debouched onto a huge open space strewn with white gravel — some sort of barracks parade ground, as I saw it. I immediately glimpsed a tall figure of commanding appearance striding directly toward us from the building opposite. He was wearing high boots and a tight-fitting uniform jacket with gold buttons and a diagonal leather strap over his chest. In one of his hands I saw he had a thin crop, rather like the ones used by horse riders, which he was continually tapping against the lacquered polish of his boot uppers. A minute later, with us by then waiting in stationary ranks, I was also able to make out that he was handsome in his fashion, fit, and all in all with something of the movie star about him, given his manly features and narrow brown moustache, fashionably clipped, which went very well with his sun-bronzed face. When he got nearer, a command from the gendarmes snapped us all to attention. All that has stayed with me after that are two almost simultaneous impressions: the stentorian voice of the riding-crop wielder, akin to that of a market stall-keeper, which came as such a shock after his otherwise immaculate appearance that maybe this is why I did not take in much of what he actually said. What I did grasp, however, was that he did not intend to conduct the “investigation”—that was the term he used — into our cases until the next day, upon which he turned toward the gendarmes, ordering them, in a bellow that filled the entire square, to take “the whole Jewish rabble” off to the place that, in his view, they actually belonged — the stables, that is to say — and lock them in for the night. My second impression was the immediately ensuing indecipherable babble of commands, the bellowed orders with which the abruptly reanimated gendarmes herded us away. I didn’t even know offhand which way I was supposed to turn, and all I remember is that in the thick of it I felt a bit like laughing, in part out of astonishment and confusion, a sense of having been dropped slap in the middle of some crazy play in which I was not entirely acquainted with my role, in part because of a fleeting thought that just then flashed across my mind, which was my stepmother’s face when it finally dawned on her that it would be pointless to count on seeing me for supper this evening.