The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914 (12 page)

I was issued with a travel warrant to Budapest. Nothing wrong with Jóska: he was told to report to regimental headquarters in Veszprém. The warrant was for Neu-Sandez—Eperjes—Kassa—Miskolc—Budapest.

“I’ll take the bandages off so that you have a bit of a wash.”

“I have no towel, or soap, or toothbrush, or clean clothes.”

The doctor spoke a few words to a nurse. “But don’t get the wound wet.”

I was shown to a bathroom and supplied with all that I needed. A wash! Could this be true? And clean clothing! I was given that too. The undershorts were too large and I had to hold them up. Never mind!

“Don’t be fussy, Ensign. You’re lucky to have these.” I would get Jóska to re-sew the button once we were on the train.

“They’ll give you something to eat at the field kitchens at the stations.”

It had been two weeks since I had last looked in a mirror, and I was somewhat taken aback by what I saw, even though the mirror had lost most of its silvering. There was not much I could do about the blood-matted hair around the wound. The blood dried into my centimeter-long stubble was blackish-purple, a dark
caput mortuum
.
[6]
There were also red patches the size of ten- and twenty-fillér coins at the roots of my beard. They itched abominably, and I had been scratching them absent-mindedly, but had not seen them until now. Two or three days, and I would be in Budapest. I wouldn’t report to the hospital straight away. The family doctor could look after me.

Now to board a waiting passenger train, and sleep. I would be going home by the same route that I had come. How different things had been then! Neu-Sandez
[7]
decked out with flags and flowers, bands playing, crowds of the curious, well-wishers’ gifts in heaps.
Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant
.
[8]
The champagne had flowed. Now, with fresh bandages, I made no impression, even though my head was swathed in them. When I had gone, bloodily, to report, the crowd had parted ahead of me, and a young girl had stared at me aghast, her hand clapped over her mouth and her face frozen. The picture made such a vivid impression on me that I could still draw it. Now, with only my bloodstained coat to hint at what I had gone through, no one was in any hurry to let me through. I had lost my martial glamour.

A passenger train was waiting and we pushed our way onto an elderly, but decent, first-class carriage—a triple-axle side-door unit—reserved for officers, where we laid claim to half of a compartment. I stretched myself out and, minutes later, was asleep.

It was nighttime when I awoke with a start. The phosphorescent hands of my loyal friend showed one-thirty on the dial. The train was crawling along. With my forehead pressed against the window, I could just make out the hazy outlines of great mountains, amongst which our engine panted along endless curves. Dear Lord, we were already in the Tatra!
[9]
We must be getting close to the Hungarian border; perhaps we had already crossed it.

Jóska was lying on his back on the floor and making snoring noises not unlike those that came from the engine.

I got up and stuffed my cape under his head as a pillow. He gave a slightly dim-witted smile and promptly went back to sleep.

I had started to find myself suddenly waking from sleep, gripped by the urge to escape from something or other and get somewhere or other, and it took a while for me to realize where I was. The slamming of a door would send a spasm through me, and I would jump to my feet, disorientated. A cigarette then calmed me down. Apart from that, I slept as if I had passed out.

I sat for hours with my face pressed against the window’s glass, watching the passing scenery. A stream to the right and, to the left, the vague massing of huge mountains, like a stage set; all that was lacking was the Valkyries storming about the peaks. Above their summits, the sky was beginning to turn pale, defining the outlines of these colossal forms more distinctly against the background.

Nature slumbered, seemingly indifferent. Everything moved forward in accordance with unchanging laws; sleeping or waking, every struggle, in accordance with its slow, organic, gradual, hidden evolutionary laws. Nature flowed on its course, impervious to the absurd behavior of men, their mutual slaughter and assorted acts of wickedness. The whole world was manifestly indifferent in the face of the life-and-death struggles of men: it neither took their side nor opposed them, but simply paid no attention. Let them get on with it. Let them reap what they sow.

I awoke to find myself curled rigidly into a ball, my nose practically resting on my knees. I gathered up my cramped, numbed limbs and stretched myself out along the seat. Jóska snored on without interruption. Happy young lad, full of life. He’ll live: his wily brain will protect him from every threat.

The train was racing downhill. It was getting light and the line was curving its way through beautiful countryside. We were in Hungary now. My home.

I was startled awake by noise, the shrieking of brakes and a familiar cry: “Eperjes!”
[10]

Eperjes: the oft-repeated stories of my father’s youthful days here . . . Tears came to my eyes. I’m tired out. My nerves aren’t right. I lay still and pictured Budapest, my home. I had left another world behind there, a hundred years ago.

I knew the way from here. Kassa,
[11]
where we would have to change trains; Miskolc,
[12]
from where I could send a telegram home. I’d be home by tomorrow morning at the latest.

Jóska clambered to his feet, groaning noisily, clearing his throat, scratching himself, and the rest of it.
Naturalia non sunt turpia
.
[13]
Then he gathered himself together and jumped off the train in search of some breakfast and cigarettes. It was a large station with a military command post, and there would be charity volunteers. Minutes later, he was back, with a load of cold cuts and a fistful of cigarettes.

My wound had stopped hurting; only the dressing tugged at it. My right leg was still behaving oddly. I felt unsure of it and hardly dared to put my weight on it. It kept buckling under me. I had stopped paying it much attention. It was better than being dead. It wouldn’t stop me from painting. If only! The future was still a big question mark. The war was still getting bigger.

An “unfit for service” came past; we exchanged greetings and he handed a newspaper in through the open window. Report from the battlefield! Glorious weather! Battle-readiness of our troops unbreakable! They await the Russian attack from new positions, etcetera. It had evidently been composed by the armchair generals
[14]
of the Pest coffeehouses. I leafed through the paper, looking mostly at the headlines. How alien it was! How far removed these people were from the agonies, the mortal fear as shells explode around you, the marches that exhaust to the limits of consciousness, the mangled dead, their open eyes staring into oblivion. Yes, far away, and with no conception of the reality of war. Of being unwashed, with clothes soaked for weeks in the tired body’s every humid exhalation, and so filthy that they stick to the skin; of lice; or of when a man gets scabies and itches night and day, scratching his tormented body until it is bloody.

The editorial and literary tables of Pest’s coffeehouses were surely, even now, untouchable; “essential occupations.” Or, if the worst came to the worst, they would see about positions in the military press office.

The New York Café: the lair of the “Ady-ites,” where all the prattlers gathered round to worship the master.
[15]
I had heard that Ady had done everything—apparently, he even went to see the prime minister—to avoid the overwhelming terror of battle. Festering in the coffeehouses all night is undoubtedly preferable to a nice little bullet through the gut: leave that to others. In his poems, he sings of death, whilst delegating its practical implementation. Such exceptional people were entitled to stay at home instead, and rot morale.

The company at the Fészek coffeehouse must be there too. Teplánszky in full voice, Egry
[16]
playing chess or draughts, then at midnight they would all file out to the amusement park to play at hoopla or some other foolery. A rum crew! I don’t know where Teplánszky found them all. With most of them it’s hard to tell who or what they are. The sculptors, at least—Károly Székely,
[17]
Péter Gindert
[18]
—come from the Epreskert artists’ colony.
[19]
But those who are supposed to be painters? Even among these, there are some who are “of positive value,” from Benczúr’s
[20]
circle: Mányai,
[21]
Mozárt Rottmann,
[22]
Emil Papp,
[23]
or one or two of Tépi’s intelligent teacher friends: Heiman, Kornis, and Molnár. But these only come in the afternoons. Egry regards them as philistines and snipes at them fatuously. Heiman fires back: “Seems that you and teachers have never got on. You didn’t get to school much.”

I wouldn’t be going to see them, I thought. Not for the time being, anyway. They would receive me with cynicism, with something along the lines of “the enlightened anti-militarist always finds the hidden way, so that he can get out of this mess.”

Kassa! We charge in, as befits a great station. The Kassa-Oderberg line terminates here, and we have to change onto the Hungarian National Railway.

Kassa: the largest and finest city I had ever seen at ten years of age. My admiring gaze paid homage to the beauties of its cathedral, and I wandered its big-city streets in a trance. My parents had taken me to visit some relatives, who welcomed us with shrieks of delight and half-Slovak exclamations, their short vowels unfamiliar to my Bereg county ears, and tugged me this way and that in affection.

“Lemme look atcher, lil fellah!
Jak se mas?
”
[24]

They rather scared me. Then the good
borovicka
[25]
would be brought out. Fond memories. My old nurse was from this district; she never learned Hungarian to her dying day. She spoke to my grandmother in Slovak: “
Panym rodrena
.”
[26]

Memories that, until now, hadn’t counted as memories. My head buzzed with them. Familiar landscapes stirred them up in me; familiar landscapes that were physically unchanged from when I had passed through them on my way to hell on earth, and yet were different now. Something had changed. They stirred up memories of my former life; I felt connected with them by bonds of emotion, yet they turned their backs on me. They had no interest in me. Everything went on living the life it had lived for centuries, indifferent to what men did. Nature simply has no interest in the works of men. Everything went on in its own way, and would have done so if I had bought it.

Nature has equipped man with every tool, every facility, with body and soul, brain and strength. If he puts these to bad use, he suffers the harm, but nature cares nothing of this. Until he turns against nature: then it gets its revenge.

Such thoughts occupied me, and the indifference of the external world oppressed me. I felt as if I had been abandoned.

In the wrecked forest at Magierov, I had seen only a single bird: an exhausted crow sitting on a broken branch. At the sound of gunfire it, too, had flown off somewhere. “There are humans here, I must escape and save my skin,” he had thought to himself.

I believe that the world would look on unconcerned if the whole of mankind wiped itself out. It would create others. They might be cleverer.

The further away I got from the battlefield, the more indifferent people became. Here and there, I encountered a few enthusiastic and optimistic patriots who would sound off about Hungarian heroism; faced with them, I too felt indifferent. But what could they have done? It was not malice that had made them as they were; it seemed that this was natural. It’s one thing to hear about something or observe it, and another to experience it. The crow had the right idea. Faced with danger, he fled; he did not fight, except perhaps for food.

Save your skin! Which would be fine, if the enemy did the same thing. But he’ll wipe you out if you don’t shoot back.

Save your skin, because if everyone sacrifices themselves, there will be no Hungary! Shoot back, and shoot straight! He who shoots first has the advantage.

Save your skin! You still have a lot of painting to do . . .

My gaze alighted on Jóska, who was sitting in the opposite corner. He was watching me with a smile on his face.

“Sir is always mulling over something. Sir is starting to go gray.”

I looked at his young face, full of life. He took things as they came, following his healthy instinct, smiling slyly and saving his skin.

We sat silently facing each other, a man-child full of vitality, and a twenty-nine-year-old graybeard.

I sent a telegram from Miskolc: arriving home, injured, at such-and-such an hour. Sitting by the window, my forehead pressed against the cool glass, I gazed out, now and then dozing off for a minute. I only half-registered the familiar station names. Mezőkövesd, Szinhalom, glad days of my youth; I recognized the spot beside the embankment where we had picnicked, so much food and good cheer, where I had raced with Zoli; Zoli, who had thrown up afterwards, Uncle Béla staring in alarm; the prelude to a tragic early death, and a family’s collapse.

Füzesabony: fun in the station tearoom; music at night, local lads, pretty girls. All distant memories, and remote, as if these things had not happened to me at all, but were stories told to me by someone I knew.

Budapest! The train glided slowly in under the glazed roof of the vast station hall. Jóska bustled about, trying to grab everything. I owed a debt of gratitude to this healthy, resourceful lad; though I knew that this personal service had been an opportunity for a bit of bunking-off on his part.

My father was standing on the platform. I could see him, but it took him a little while to spot me. He hurried towards me, his face pale. I must be strong now. Optimistic. Act like a soldier.

In his wordless embrace, I felt his arms tremble. I tried to smile.

With his left arm stretched out ahead of him, he opened a path through the waiting crowd, which parted in alarm. One or two people stared at me, with what seemed to me to be dread and horror. Indeed, I could not have been a reassuring sight in my cape blackened with dried blood, my blood-soaked bandages, and the dried blood and festering, itching patches alternating with dirt under my week-old stubble. I doubt if these all made a very favorable impression.