Anna Edes Read online

  Table of Comtents

  Introduction

  1. The Flight of Béla Kun

  2. His Excellency, the Comrade and Her Ladyship

  3. A Sour Meal

  4. Anxieties

  5. Ministry and Mystery

  6. Anna

  7. New Broom Sweeps Clean

  8. The Phenomenon

  9. A Debate about Sponge Fingers, Compassion and Equality

  10. Legend

  11. Master Jancsi

  12. A Wild Night

  13. Love

  14. Something Very Bitter

  15. Winter

  16. Matter, Spirit and Soul

  17. Carnival

  18. The Terror

  19. Why

  20. Dialogue before a Green Fence

  INTRODUCTION

  The story of Anna Édes is one of innocence exploited. The very name of the heroine means ‘sweet’, and sweetness is part of her nature. A peasant girl up from the village, who receives employment as a domestic in Budapest, honest, hard-working and simple to the point of simple-mindedness, she is exploited by certain members of the newly recovered middle-classes of 1919 – a selfish and reactionary section of society which had suffered two severe shocks: defeat in the First World War, then a brace of short-lived socialist revolutions. A third great shock, the loss of two-thirds of the country’s territory by decree of the Treaty of Trianon, was still to come.

  Hungary had entered the war as part of the dual monarchy, her territory extending far into the countries that presently surround her. The various messily distributed nationalities naturally wanted independence, or at least greater autonomy, and as the war progressed they joined the Allies. The defeat of the dual monarchy increased the clamour for full independence. Then, as now, the crumbling of an empire led to a rise in nationalistic feeling. The first revolution in October 1918, known as the Autumn Roses Revolution, established the socialist government of Count Mihály Károlyi, who declared Hungary a republic. But the external pressure was too great. The Romanian army advanced on Hungary and in March Károlyi resigned to be replaced by Béla Kun, a Bolshevik who counted on Russian help. His soviet-style Republic of Councils (which included George Lukács as minor member of the government) instituted a Red Terror, then set about the nationalization of the land that Károlyi had only just begun to distribute to the peasants. By August the experiment was over. The unspeakable had happened and Romanian troops occupied Budapest.

  Dezső Kosztolányi, who at the age of thirty-four was a witness to these events, had started to publish very early, when he was only sixteen. The son of a science teacher and occasional author, he was born in 1885 while his father was working in the city of Szabadka in southern Hungary. After school he studied German in Budapest and Vienna. His reputation was made in 1907 by his first collection of poems, Within Four Walls. His second, The Complaints of a Poor Little Child (1910), confirmed his standing and enjoyed enormous popularity. Together with the friends he made at university, and who were to remain his literary companions for the rest of his life, he established a new literary journal called Nyugat (Occident), which quickly became the foremost magazine of its kind in the country. Three generations of Hungarian poets were drawn to it by its high regard for craft and intelligence.

  In a generation of elegant stylists, Kosztolányi was the most elegant. Handsome, witty and charming, he proclaimed himself an aesthete and established a career as journalist, commentator and first-rate short-story writer. Baudelaire and Rilke were among those writers he most admired. He was interested in psychoanalysis, made copious translations from various languages and moved with ease through coffee-house society. He also continued to publish a steady stream of poems of which some have established themselves as classics of twentieth-century Hungarian poetry. Though his touch was light – he loved bravura rhyme and was equally at home with free verse – it hinted at darker emotions. There was a nervous but disciplined melancholy at work in him which saved him from mere facility. Having been somewhat traumatized by the First World War and its consequences, he preferred to keep his distance from party political commitment and was sometimes mistrusted as a result. But he inspired enormous affection and loyalty among his friends.

  Kosztolányi didn’t begin to write novels until 1921 but soon displayed an impressive talent for the genre. His psychological insight was keen, his prose clear and classical. Indeed, there are many who prefer his fiction to his verse. His second novel, Nero: the Bloody Poet, which appeared in 1922 (recently republished in English as The Darker Muses), won an important literary prize and the enthusiastic approval of Thomas Mann, who wrote an introduction for it. The extended short story that followed this, Skylark (1924), is thought by some to be his single finest work. Others however award that honour to his fifth and last novel, Anna Édes, published in 1926.

  The early elegance is certainly in evidence here, but the book is clearly driven by pity and anger. While it is full of comic, lyrical and psychologically acute vignettes it is considerably more than the sum of its attractive parts. The story begins with the flight of Béla Kun and the arrival of the unsophisticated Romanian army, and ends before the trauma of Trianon, at which time Kosztolányi’s own place of birth disappeared into Yugoslavia. But the book’s true interest is not in realpolitik: having established the historical moment Kosztolányi is concerned with the nature of his society rather than it specific fortunes. The ceremonial arrival in Budapest of Admiral Horthy, whose regency was to last until the latter days of the Second World War and who instituted a period of White Terror, is described almost in passing. But the spirit of the time, its cruelty and emptiness, permeate the household in which Anna’s personal tragedy unfolds.

  Her first appearance is delayed. Kosztolányi makes us see her through her employer, Mrs Vizy’s eyes first. She notes that Anna doesn’t look like a peasant:

  Her nose was not merely ‘normal’ but of a decidedly interesting shape with wide nostrils: there was something piquant about it. She was slightly taller than average but frailly built, a shade underdeveloped, even a touch boyish. Her lips were pale and chapped. Her hands were as rough as you might expect in a servant, her nails short and square.

  This is an owner’s view of a prospective possession. Kosztolányi’s sense of physical detail is extremely acute and is successfully transferred to his heroine who is terrified by the smell of camphor emanating from the Vizys’ piano. This animal response to the unfamiliar smell sets the tone for the whole term of her employment and symbolizes the divide between her and the Vizys, who are substantial characters with complex inner lives but insensitive to the lives of others. They and their friends are part of a social fabric that is already partly fascist in nature. Mrs Vizy looks through people as if she didn’t see them and is obsessed with finding the perfect maid. Her husband is climbing the career ladder of the civil service. But Kosztolányi’s irony is not restricted to the obvious middle-class targets: it extends to the characters of the caretaker and his wife, as well as the other servants in the story. He is perfectly impartial and highly skilful in delicately shifting the narrative from one subject to another. These voices are then free to betray themselves without too much comment by the author.

  The book rises to two climaxes: the eroticism of Anna’s seduction by the cold-hearted popinjay Jancsi, a nephew of the Vizys, and the later murders committed by Anna. Anna herself is far from a cypher. Kosztolányi allows her the frail cocoon of innocence while managing to enter her subjectivity with complete conviction. A vulnerable and independent, if enigmatic, figure, Anna ensures that the book does not become merely an argument about social conditions but is raised to genuine tragedy.

  Kosztolányi’s narrative skill and clear, graphic prose have attracted a series of film make
rs. Three of his novels have been adapted for the cinema, Anna Édes being one of them. One can see why: it is a visual feast, the gallery of characters is appealing to actors, there is satire, romance, sex and murder, and in Dr Moviszter, the old ailing doctor, the reader discovers a protagonist who does try to see that some sort of justice is done. Kosztolányi himself was not at all religious and it is interesting that the doctor, who is, is obviously of an older passing world. Despite severe (and anticipated) criticism from the right, the book restored him to critical favour after a period when this had been slipping away from him.

  Anna Édes first appeared in England in 1947. By that time Kosztolányi and his closest friends of the first Nyugat period were all long and prematurely dead: one by suicide, one through cerebral haemorrhage, one, like Kosztolányi himself, through cancer of the throat. Reputation has been a fickle goddess in twentieth-century Hungary. Although other, more radical writers of the thirties, such as Attila József and Gyula Illyés, rejected both his stance and his manner, by the time of his death in 1936 Kosztolányi’s literary reputation appeared secure. After the Communist take-over in 1949, so called ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ aestheticism met with official disapproval and despite the social conscience so clearly evident in his work he was thought to be unsound. The wheel has turned again since then: few people would now query the classic status that is usually accorded him.

  His was an ill-fated generation but a remarkably lively and intelligent one. The last great Nyugat writer – of the third generation – was Sándor Weöres, who died recently, in 1989. With him the remarkable firework display of early and mid-century Hungarian literature came to a spectacular end. Kosztolányi’s work formed a major part of that display. The reader familiar with the world of Roth, Musil and von Doderer will recognize the place and find it enriched.

  Having said that, I have left place names in the original Hungarian on the principle that we tend not to translate such terms from German, French or Italian. Város is town or district, út and utca are street and road respectively, körút is ring road, tér is square, hegy (often used as a suffix) is hill. The two districts which figure largely in the book are both in Buda, close to the river. The Vár or Fortress district was the old administrative centre, containing the royal palace. The Vérmező (literally Field of Blood) in the Krisztina district is an open space where the Jacobite rebels of 1795 were executed.

  More complex are the old pre-war forms of address which have no direct equivalent in English, such as nagyságos úr, or méltósagos úr which denote subtle distinctions in civil society. They are generally used by lower ranks in deference to those above them, and are quite precise in their application. I have tried to imply these by tone and manner, and point them up when they are an integral part of the comedy or of some social strategy.

  George Szirtes

  Oremus pro fidelibus defunctis. Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine et lux perpetua luceat eis.

  Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis: Dolores inferni circumdederunt me.

  Absolve Domine Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel.

  Et ne nos inducas in tentationem. Sed libera nos a malo. A porta inferi. Erue Domine animam eius.

  Ne tradas bestiis animas confidentes tibi. Et animas pauperum tuorum ne obliviscaris in finem.

  Domine Jesu Christe miserere ei. Christe parce ei.

  Domine exaudi orationem meam. Et clamor meus ad te veniat.

  Miserere mei Deus. Non intres in judicium cum famula tua Domine.

  In paradisum deducant te Angeli: et cum Lasaro quondam paupere vitam habeas sempiternam.

  Oremus. Anima eius et animae omnium fidelium defunctorum per misericordiam Dei requiescant in pace.

  Rituale Romanum

  1

  The Flight of Béla Kun

  Béla Kun was fleeing the country in an aeroplane.

  In the afternoon – at about five o’clock – an aeroplane rose over the Soviet headquarters in the Hotel Hungaria, crossed the Danube and, passing the palace on top of the Várhegy, banked steeply towards the Vérmező Gardens.

  The pilot of the aircraft was none other than the head of state himself.

  He flew low, barely sixty feet above the ground. His face could be clearly seen.

  He was pale and unshaven as usual. He grinned at those below and gave an occasional shabby and sardonic wave of farewell.

  His pockets were stuffed with sweet pastry. He carried jewels, relics of the church and precious stones that had once belonged to well-disposed and generous aristocratic women. There were other valuables too.

  Great gold chains hung from his arms.

  As the aeroplane began to climb, and just as it was disappearing from sight, one such gold chain fell right in the middle of the Vérmező where it was found by an elderly and long-established resident of the Krisztina area, an excise clerk who worked in the Fortress, or Vár, district, in Szentháromság tér, the square dedicated to the Holy Trinity, one Károly József Patz by name.

  Such at least were the rumours in the Krisztina area.

  2

  His Excellency, the Comrade and Her Ladyship

  The day the news spread about the necklace, on 31 July 1919, at six o’clock in the afternoon, Kornél Vizy called for his maid.

  ‘Katica!’ he shouted.

  A girl as plump as a pigeon stood in the kitchen. It seemed she was about to go out. She was all dressed up in a pink blouse, a white skirt with a black canvas belt, and a new pair of patent leather shoes. She examined herself in a handmirror, sprinkled a little white powder on her handkerchief and dabbed it over her puffy face. She heard his shout but stayed where she was.

  The bell had been out of order since the previous political administration so it was necessary to shout for the servants, though if he was in the study he could knock on the thin partition wall between it and the kitchen.

  His voice was growing angry.

  Noticing this, the girl crossed the long, narrow hall, paused before the mirrored hatstand to adjust her hair, then, her ample hips billowing, waddled into the dining room.

  A man about forty years of age was sprawling on the divan in such an advanced state of neglect he might have been taken for a tramp. His shirt was creased, his winter trousers worn at the knee, his shoes badly scuffed, and he was without a tie. Only his aquiline nose and muttonchop whiskers suggested he might be a person of consequence.

  He was clutching the latest issue of Vörös Ūjság, the Communists’ official organ. He held it at a distance, almost at arm’s length, since he was very long sighted. He was so absorbed in his reading he did not immediately notice the maid. The article before him proclaimed the imminent collapse of the state with the headline, The Proletariat in Danger!

  Katica moved closer to the divan.

  ‘You’re here then, are you?’ growled Vizy. ‘How often do I have to shout for you?’ He shrugged his shoulders glumly, as if to moderate his sternness.

  The girl stared at the floor with bland indifference.

  ‘All right,’ said Vizy, more conciliatory now, but still morose, as if talking to himself. ‘Shut all the windows.’

  Katica set off.

  ‘Wait! The shutters too. And pull down the blinds. You understand?’ He hesitated. ‘There was shouting outside.’

  He threw down the paper. It rustled as it fell to the ground. The brown colour of the cheap straw-pulp looked as if it had been scorched in some universal conflagration. He rose from the divan and, hands in pockets, stalked over to the open dining-room window.

  There below was the Bolshevik soldier who had cried out a few moments ago, but he looked so lonely and forlorn that hatred was wasted on him. A shrivelled, emaciated member of the proletariat, more embryo than human being, he was a figure upon whom the rifle with its fixed bayonet hung as if someone had slung it there as an afterthought.

  The sunset streamed across the parched and flattened acres of the Vérmező as it had always done: it gilded the crowns of the Buda Hills and picked out the cross
of a distant church.

  At the top of the Granite Steps opposite, small groups of men huddled together, whispering in the now customary fashion, almost lip-reading each other’s conversation. They looked like sheep deserted by their shepherd and were the only sign of change.

  Not a cloud in sight. A heavy drowsiness lay over everything, the kind that precedes summer showers, when the wind seems to hold its breath, when nature feels like an enormous room, when the trees look like toys and people stand about like wax dummies.

  Everything was numb, no movement, not a sound. The only thing that gave an impression of movement was a poster bearing the legend To arms! To arms! on which a frenzied sailor was brandishing a flag with such superhuman vehemence that he seemed to have become part of it, his lantern jaw widening in a scream so vast it threatened to swallow the whole world.

  Vizy had often passed this poster but had never really dared to examine it. In fact this was the first time he could look on it with equanimity, without a feeling of bedazzlement. A man can gaze at the setting sun without damaging his eyes.

  Further off, on the Krisztina Boulevard a lorry laden with gaudily dressed children thundered into town as if it were a fire-engine on emergency call. It was returning from an excursion in the Zúgliget Woods, and the children were waving sticks at passers-by.

  From the hill there rose the sound of thin childish voices in unison:

  Rise, rise, oppressed of every nation,

  Rise, rise, ye starving masses, rise.

  Blissful in their ignorance, a dozen or so young clerks and apprentices were earnestly singing the words they had only recently been taught: those of the Internationale.

  Katica, having shut the windows in all the other rooms, now closed those in the dining room. When all the windows were tight, Vizy sidled over to Katica and with a nervous, sickly smile whispered, ‘They’ve lost.’

  The news was of no interest to the maid, or if it was she did not show it. But her master stood in front of her. His wife was not home yet and he longed to pour his heart out to someone.