Prague (27 page)

xiv. The Americans and British bomb you in the mornings. Your eldest son (and trained heir) is killed. The Soviets bomb you in the evenings. Your third son is killed. The Soviets invade. The Germans—having already been driven out of nearly every country they once occupied—decide, for no discernible strategic reason, to hold on to Hungary and, with their Arrow Cross partners, to make a last stand atop Castle Hill. Jews are murdered in the streets and along the lovely Danube riverfront quays, where they are tied together and pushed from the elegant Corso in front of the bombed Bristol, Carlton, and Hungaria Hotels into the icy river. Tank and artillery battles flatten the city. Your wife is killed. Please explain how to continue profitable press operations despite your crippling grief, thoughts of suicide, and the country's near-total economic collapse.

xv. As the last of the Germans retreat, murdering as they flee (Hungary is their enemy), the nation's victorious Russian saviors begin to steal or rape anything worth stealing or raping (Hungary is their enemy). Your office is smashed to pieces, and Soviet soldiers defecate on your library, including rare editions dating back to the 1800s, among which are exquisitely produced volumes of your grandfather's poetry. The Soviet Army, needing to meet the deliriously high POW numbers it reported to Stalin during the war, kidnaps Hungarian males to crate back to the USSR whether or not they ever fought and, if they did fight, whether or not they fought for the Axis. Your last remaining child, a strapping boy of twenty-three, hides in a basement for 157 days, then emerges, squinting, ninety-four pounds under his prewar weight. You are not much interested anymore.

xvi. Your country has lost another world war. Hungarian currency is worthless. Ink and paper are scarce. The city boasts no gas, electricity, telephone service, or unbroken glass. Your office building is standing, but your presses are badly damaged. Some surviving Jews begin to return and reclaim their looted apartments, furniture, and other possessions. Please operate your

family business in the current chaos, and with scarcely enough energy or desire to get out of your reeking bed.

xvii. Relative peace, semi-democracy, and rebuilding ensue, though the Communists are organizing in the background, arresting, torturing, murdering their opponents while they take over the police and security apparatus of the country. You have few employees, few capital assets, no appetite to go on. You spend days at a time just sitting in an over stuffed brown chair with a grease-stained antimacassar. The owners of this chair have not yet returned from their wartime residence. The question of whether they will return and then find and claim this chair, which is rightly yours, occupies a disproportionate amount of your thinking. You speak hardly at all. Your remaining son, an accidental child of your middle age, whom you know only slightly, brings you food and cigarettes. You eat little and smoke much. Occasionally, you go to the press and watch silently as some of your employees attempt to rebuild. You are accused of pro-Nazi sympathies for some of your actions and statements during the war, but your son defends you vigorously; rather than being hanged in public, you are largely left alone. You are indifferent. You die of chronic untreated heart trouble and your son buries you at Kerepesi Cemetery in the bright sunshine of July 16, 1947. You are laid to rest in the same vault that contains your numerous ancestors, your wife, your twin sister, and your four eldest children. The owners of the armchair find their way home the next week, and your son does not know what to say or do other than politely hold the door and allow the neighbor he has known and liked since childhood to push her furniture back across the hall, where it belongs.

THE
 
THIRD
  
IMRE
  
HO RVATH —NAMED
  
IN
  
A
  
MOMENT
 
OF
  
SENTIMENTAL
 
WEAK-

ness by a middle-aged father who had previously sworn to excise that name from the family history—stood in the partially rebuilt office. His inheritance— stewarded for five generations in preparation for his eldest brother—was worth almost nothing when it was delivered to him, Karoly's fifth and only child, that July afternoon in 1947. The press had small cash reserves in a valueless currency. It could scarcely obtain ink, paper, or equipment. It sat in a bombed-out city, where entrepreneurs in private boats ferried joyless passengers from bank to bank, past the semi-sunken, spanless husks of the Danube's great bridges: The Chain Bridge resembled Stonehenge; the golden Elizabeth squatted in the

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brown water like a society woman gone mad, her fine dresses torn and bunched around her hips while she washed her privates in full public view and sensitive souls wondered what had become of their world.

Imre signed a few unread documents and was handed a set of keys, for most of which he never found a corresponding lock. He had never had any reason, until 1945, to think that he would become the head of the family and then was unimpressed by this nasty honor during his 15 7-day residence in his building's cellar. By the time of his father's death, he felt equal only to the task of closing the press officially prior to leaving the country. He had never hoped to be at the helm of a business. He wanted to be anywhere but in the smoldering city that had consumed his entire family. He had risen to the leadership of an extinct clan, of an all but dead company. He embodied family traditions and burdens now plainly irrelevant.

Besides which, the Horvath family history had never much mattered to this Imre. He had heard pieces of it from relatives and his father's workers over the years but had never received the concerted education his brothers had enjoyed. He had, for example, been told by his grandmother of a soldier in his family, whom he associated with the toy soldiers that same grandmother had given him on a separate occasion, so that even much later, when he understood that his ancestor had fought and died for an independent Hungary at Kapolna in 1848, he still could not help but dress that distant Viktor in full armor, with a white tunic that matched his squire's pennon.

When he was very young, Imre's mother would take him from time to time to visit his wordless, brusque father at the office. There the little boy saw his elder brothers working and learning the business, and they would stop to tickle him before saying, very importantly, that they were needed down at the machinery or that there was a distribution problem Father wanted them to solve and they couldn't talk longer—the press has to be kept under control after all, Mother—and then the much-admired seventeen-year-old brother and the un-predictably cruel sixteen-year-old brother would stride off, the elder lecturing the younger with professional gestures. Then Imre's mother might take him to the archives, and she might show him the beautiful volumes, covered in gold or soft with velvet, and explain that this one was actually written by his own ancestor, a poet who disappeared mysteriously and was never heard from again, and perhaps Imre might someday write great books. Then Imre's father might appear in the doorway and call for his wife, and she might talk to him in the hall, and Imre might be left alone for a few glorious minutes that swelled to re-

semble hours, and he would wander through a forest made of books, stacks of books reconstituted into tall trees, behind which lurked enemies Imre would vanquish with lance and mace before composing heroic odes over their bodies. In 1947, Imre stood amid the tiny remaining stacks that had once formed his enchanted forest and listened to six men who expected him to provide them income. He found it difficult to concentrate as the half-dozen employees who still saw reason to hang around enumerated for him the little that remained of

the Horvath Kiado.

Instead, Imre was distracted by the thought of two fetuses growing fright-eningly fast, one on each side of the Danube, the nerve-racking result of a six-month flurry of seduction, which had coincided with the six last miserable months of his father's life. For half a year, Imre had displayed a religious commitment to philandering. A life full of women, he had vaguely decided, was owed to him, repayment for the loss of his family and for his 15 7 days of fear and boredom. A zesty and fully savored life, full of women, he told friends, was a man's natural embrace of the world, the only noble, human response to the destruction of Budapest. His friends agreed, but none could match Imre's appetite or pace until, in the days afer his father's funeral, his urges subsided as quickly as they had come and snuffed themselves out completely the afternoon of the flabbergasting double annunciation, as one after another barely recalled woman turned up at his apartment to share awful news.

"And that is the sad state of our affairs, Horvath ur." Imre grudgingly offered to come into the office a few more times, at least until some stability was achieved and someone else took control, or circumstances became too obvious to ignore and no one bothered to come at all anymore. While he waited for the others to give up, "a few more times" quickly absorbed a few weeks, and then a month or two, during which Imre was taught by his employees how to work and repair the press's machinery. He learned how messengers sent by newspaper editors brought articles pasted on cardboard for him to print. He learned how books were built and spines stamped (though none were being produced). He learned what the strange little picture of a gun meant. Imre learned about the company's sad finances, about his father's poor—then erratic, then frightened, then abdicated—decisions, about the firm's reliance on clients and partners and writers now overthrown or executed or in prison. Imre gathered opinions from his employees and his friends about what books people might buy if they had any money. He kept lists of these theoretical books, and he searched the ruins of the archives for reprint possibilities, and in the meantime

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he continued printing two- or four-page newspapers that would go out of business after only a few issues, and modest black-and-white advertising posters that, even in their modesty, were misleading: The shops they sheepishly extolled had pathetically little to sell.

A few months lined up to become six. His skill at scavenging and black marketeering—acquired during a war that felt, until the triple tragedy of 1944-45, like a game he played with undeniable skill—served him and the press well as the primordial economy slowly re-evolved from bartery ooze back to an upright currency. He squeezed enough money from his desiccated legacy to make discreet payments and gifts to two young mothers on opposite sides of the river.

And at last he won his first victories. He commissioned the mothers of a few of his friends to write a cookbook featuring recipes suitable for shortages, and Enough for Everyone, the first book to be published by the Horvath Press in four years, sold very respectably. Six worried employees multiplied and became eight occasionally optimistic employees.

Awakening Nation had long since vanished, and any old copies Imre happened to find he promptly combusted, especially those featuring the increasingly raving "Letter from the Publisher." But the financial paper, now Our Pengo, began to sell well again. Imre was soon lucky enough to arrange, through a friend, a contract to print ration-book coupons as well. A ninth employee was deemed useful.

Over nine months, the Horvath Press gave birth to four contradictory history books covering the previous thirty-three years. All of the books were financed by new or restored political parties; it was as if, with an uncertain future, the past as well grew hazy and no one could quite agree who had done what to whom or why, who had been wicked and who had been wise, except that everybody agreed Trianon was a crime. Imre read as much as he could of all four volumes, making less and less progress with each. Their proceeds, however, paid for a new truck and repairs to the warehouse and one of the presses.

The reborn Horvath Kiado's most successful postwar venture was released at the beginning of 1948, just after the final governmental takeover by the Communists. The book was Imre's own inspiration and a work he cherished for many years. He collected photographs from friends and friends of friends and outright strangers all over Budapest. He simply asked people to loan him family portraits, old snapshots, favorite pictures of the city or the countryside—anything they truly loved. He asked for a line or two of written

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description. Then he edited and combined these donations into an album, which he published under the title Bekeben (In Peacetime). He captioned each photograph with its description in the first person, even though the words represented hundreds of different speakers. This is my brother the day he left to study in England. . . . This is a poor family that lived next to us; they had almost nothing, but they were extremely kind to that little dog, a mutt named Tedi. . . . This is my mother and father on their wedding day, 1913.... This is my mother and father on their wedding day, 1919 ... on their wedding day, 1930.... This is a Jew who lived in our building and was very kind to me when 1 was a girl. I hope he is well, but I fear not.... This is me as a little boy on the Elizabeth Bridge with my friends.... This is my family at Lake Balaton in 1922. . . . This is a picture of my father riding horses with the regent.... This is a meeting of a labor union, and my brother is speaking at the podium.... This is how the Corso looked in 1910.... This is the old fish market; it doesn't exist anymore.... This is how the Chain Bridge looked before.... This is my father in front of his shop; he died at Auschwitz. . . . This is my grandmother as a young girl.... This is a party for my name day at the Gerbeaud; I am the one looking at the kremes with big eyes...