Raggle-Taggle (1933)/Chapter 5
Chapter V
A Vagabond in Budapest
LIFE in Budapest moves to a rapid rhythm than elsewhere in Europe, as though every moment of the day had unlimited possibilities of emotional excitement. In the morning early I was awakened by the deafening noise of cornets, played on the landing outside my room by a group of three fat men. They were out for the day and this vigorous music was their morning tonic. Down in the street I passed a band of urchins playing drums and flutes as they marched along.
Nearly every little pleasure boat on the Danube resounded with singing and saxophones. The music at this hour was insolently gay, for the Budapestian was out to enjoy himself. However gloomy the shadows may be that overhang Budapest in her economic life, the Magyar will not steep himself in misery, for his emotional nature gives him great powers of resistance. As my old landlady said to me: “We Hungarians are poor and we have a maimed country, but as long as we can sing and play and dance csárdás life is full of joy.” And everywhere there is feasting. Along the Danube are countless little restaurants in the open air with the tables prepared for the motley crowd. When the sun shines the scene sparkles and a vision of many colours passes before our eyes.
Everyone seems to carry packages and baskets, for the shady glades in the country call rich and poor from the city—some go to the islands of Szent Endre on the Danube or else to Visegrad and Vác. As for me, I prefer to wander through the streets, which are full of picturesque vendors wearing red fezes and shouting out as they hawk their wares. Rugs, shawls, cheap jewellery are the objects sold by those Levantines who remind us that Budapest is the beginning of the Orient. Nobody hurries through the streets, and every man seems ready for amorous adventure.
A Hungarian friend of mine rebuked me for walking fast through the streets. “You behave exactly as if you were in New York,” he said. “Here our streets are full of variety and there is only one way to enjoy yourself—never hurry. If you walk fast no girl will ever notice you. If you drag your feet as you saunter down Rákoczi Street, the girls will stop to speak to you.” Following my friend’s instructions I dragged my feet, and sure enough a dark-eyed girl smiled at me, and when I followed her she stopped and spoke to me. She was a pretty little thing with a pale face and eyes that pierced right through you. She was poorly but tidily dressed and had a bunch of wild flowers in her hand, for she had come from the woods. Conversation was very difficult for she spoke no foreign language and my knowledge of Hungarian would have shone only in a restaurant. So we walked on, conversing mainly by signs. On and on we went interminably and I wanted to go away from the girl, but I could not think of a phrase in Hungarian that would convey my meaning. At last we reached the poor suburbs of the city, a quarter called the “Hungaria Körut.” On all sides were queer little inns and shops with grotesque old people sitting in the doorways. The home of the girl was in a dark courtyard which opened on the main street. After entering the high gateway we made our way to a small one-storey house. It consisted of an entrance kitchen and a living-room. There I met the girl’s mother, a hard-faced woman of about fifty-three, who was busily occupied wringing the neck of a chicken. When the difficult operation had been done, she made me sit on a faded sofa and began to ask me questions. Nothing is so tantalizing as to have questions fired at you in a foreign language and be unable to know exactly what is said. I faintly understood that the mother was talking about a son of hers who had been killed in the War, for she handed me a photograph of a youth in Austrian uniform. Then she took a violin and bow down from a peg on the wall and set it before me. It was a dilapidated old fiddle with only three strings, and the bow was yellow and rosinless. I started to play some Hungarian melodies, following the lead of the girl as she sang. Then the mother started to weep and moan and wipe her eyes with her embroidered apron. When I turned round towards the door I saw a host of curious heads bobbing up and down outside in the street: the neighbours were as fascinated by the music as if I had been the Pied Piper. Every time I stopped playing some invisible singer would start a tune and the mother and the daughter would both nod violently at me until I tried to play the tune. Later on I went with both of them to the open-air restaurant—a rough but characteristic centre for this poor district. It consisted of a courtyard half-roofed over and half under thick trailing vines. At the back of the vine pergola was a small stage for the Gypsy orchestra, which was also roofed over. The tables were arranged in the covered portion of the courtyard. This night it was raining cats and dogs and every few seconds forked lightning lit up the sky. The rain fell with such force that all the tables under the vines had to be abandoned, and so we watched the orchestra through a curtain of rain glistening in the red, green and blue lights. The whole place was crowded with young men and young women and the old mother led us over to a table where there was a party of three men and three girls.
After a bounteous repast of ham, cutlets, paprika, gherkins and potatoes, washed down by beer served in long thin glasses, everyone became very talkative. Some of the young men knew German and translated my remarks to my two companions. Unfortunately, whether it is a Hungarian foible I know not, but they took infinite pleasure in twisting everything I said the wrong way. They would tell the girl that I was in love with her and wished her to pass the night with me. The girl would blush and the mother would cast a look of furious interrogation at me. Then another one of the young men would pile up some more meat and gherkins on the mother’s plate and she would relapse into her steady task of eating. They would also tell me in German lurid stories about the girl and her mother: that both of them were well known in the district as the most arrant hypocrites. The girl, they said, had already given birth to two illegitimate babies by different fathers. “Men like her,” they said, “but then the mother pokes her nose at them and they forthwith take to their heels rather than carry her burden as well as the daughter’s.”
In such a party there was only one thing for me to do: stand drinks all round, for I had an uncomfortable feeling that we were all gradually sliding towards a scene—one of those scenes that break out with sudden ferocity in Hungarian taverns. Luckily my attention was diverted by the Gypsy band who began their performance.
It was not a royal orchestra, for it only consisted of fiddle, drum, and piano. The violinist was a melancholy-looking Gypsy with pale face and black tousled hair. As soon as he saw me he started to play to me as the stranger. His colleague who played the drums was a singer and when he sang, for some unaccountable reason, he would put on a tall hat. The tall hat, I observed, was not introduced solely for the purpose of local colour, for at the end of each series of songs he would pass it round to be filled with money by the public.
After he had played to me I took out my violin and started to play some Russian melodies, such as the well-known “Red Sarafan.” As soon as I started he said to me—“Oh, my wife, she is a Russian. You must play them for her.” He then persuaded me to go up on the stage and play with his companions. At the end of every piece they would demand beer, and the waiter would bring it and they filled my glass, and I was amazed at their lordly liberality.
At the end of the evening, however, the waiter handed me the entire bill and I realized that I had been the host. It was my last financial show, for not a penny did it leave me to get back to my room, which was miles away at the other side of the city.
The Gypsy violinist, however, had a proposition. He wanted me to meet his wife and play the Russian melodies for her, and would I go back to his rooms, he would give me a bed. Feeling weary I accepted his invitation and we set out for his home, which was in a courtyard near the house of my friends, the mother and her daughter, whom we accompanied to their door.
When we arrived at the Gypsy’s house there were no lights in the rooms and he cursed roundly, saying that his wife must have gone out. She was however asleep on the bed, and her husband, when he found her, awoke her brutally and introduced her to me.
She was a most striking-looking woman. She was dark-skinned with beautiful features and with a certain harmony in her lithe body. Her face was oval-shaped and her eyes were deeply set. In her movements she was a panther, and every action was brusque as though she had always been driven since childhood to seize an impulse. In her relations with her husband she was surprisingly submissive, for he seemed to take a malicious pleasure in brutalizing her. He would continually taunt her and she would maintain a dogged silence for a time and then suddenly her eyes would blaze and she would rap out viperish words at him.
To me she was courteous and gentle, and she conversed in queer broken French which was very charming to hear from her guttural, low voice. She came from the South of Russia, near Kiev, and was a dancing-girl. As she spoke tears began to trickle down her cheeks and almost unconsciously she began to sing Russian Gypsy songs in a plaintive voice that had enough metallic quality in it to remind me of the eternal chanting Gypsy.
The room was dark and the one candle with its fitful light deepened the shadows around the girl as she sang. It is curious how emotion gathers force and momentum out of itself.
The girl began in a low voice, but gradually she increased its volume as she became more and more transported by the music.
The scene faded out of my mind and I imagined myself in a castle hall described by Liszt when he listened to Gypsy singing-girls of Moscow. The samovar is lit up and the bluish flame looks mysterious. One by one the blazing lamps and candles go out until the scene is illuminated only by log fires. The men drink in silence until the perfume of Ananas and citron has created desire in the women. Then the orgy starts with the dance. The old women, excited by rum, join the younger ones, and the scene becomes a Bacchanalian frenzy, and the dancers become so giddy that they form a compact group in order to stand, until at last complete exhaustion descends upon them and they all fall senseless to the ground.
Such was the scene her singing evoked in me. Her husband seized his violin and started to play a mad gopak and the girl then followed the movements faster and faster. She was now a completely transformed woman, and there was an air of fierceness about her which riled her husband, for he suddenly stopped playing and began taunting her again. As soon as the music stopped she resumed her mask of indifference.
Soon afterwards they went to bed in an adjoining room and let me curl up for the night on a sofa in a corner. It was a long time before I could sleep, for the door of their room was open and the man kept on nagging at the woman, and then she would try to mollify him, but to no avail. When sleep did come it was restless and I seemed to chase somebody from one dream into another through a vague twilight world.
All of a sudden I awoke and found myself standing on the cold floor. Where was I? All was dark around me and in that queer state of semi-consciousness I could not imagine where I was. For a moment I kept trying to find a way back into my couch at home, but then nothing seemed to work out right. I hit my foot against a chair, which rattled on the floor.
There was a shout from the other side of the room and a pair of iron hands seized me by the neck. We struggled on and on madly until a match was struck and in the light I recognized the Gypsy. Being a sufferer from somnambulism I had walked in my sleep into my host’s bedroom, and how was I to explain my presence? The Gypsy would accept no explanation: he cursed me and vowed I had stolen into the room to seize his wife while her husband lay asleep. Then amidst this hubbub the woman awoke and began to shriek and bellow as though all the demons in Hell were lacerating her flesh. Soon there was pandemonium. Then noises were heard outside and a patter of feet. Throngs of people came in to see what kind of murder had been committed.
As for me, I felt like an arrested murderer as one after another man and woman came up and scrutinized me from head to toe. And to tell the truth I was not a sight for the gods. I had divested myself of my coat and trousers when I lay down to sleep, and I was dressed only in rather inadequate pants and a thin vest.
At moments of trial like these the only satisfaction is to maintain a fierce and dogged silence. Besides, even if I could have brought myself to speak no one would have understood my Hungarian.
At last an idea came into my mind. I took up a violin that was on the table and handed it to the enraged Gypsy. At first he turned on me in a fury, but then suddenly something seemed to break within him and he started to play on the instrument. Then everything calmed down to normal: the Russian girl covered herself with a sheet, for she was all but nude; the murmuring neighbours began to sing and the hectic night finished in tranquil serenity. Outside the moon was cold and silvery—a balm to us. In the distance I heard the melancholy tone of the Tárogató, the flute-like instrument of Rákoczi, national hero of Hungary. Its soothing tone lulled me to sleep.