The Fawn

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Principal characters

Eszter Encsy, actress, narrator

Eszter’s father, non-practising lawyer

Eszter’s mother, piano teacher

The Martons, Eszter’s aristocratic relatives on her mother’s side

Auntie Irma, Eszter’s widowed aunt on her mother’s side

Kárász néni, Eszter’s next-door neighbour

Kárász Béla, neighbour’s son

Ambrus, Eszter’s other next-door neighbour

Károly, younger brother of Ambrus

Gizi, affectionately Gizike, Eszter’s friend

Józsi and Juszti, Gizi’s parents, who run the Three Hussars

Gyurica, Eszter’s doctor

Juli, Eszter’s maid

Angéla Graff, Eszter’s fellow pupil

Uncle Domi and Auntie Ilu, Angéla’s parents

Emil, Angéla’s brother

Elza, housekeeper to the Graff family

Péter, Angéla’s pet bird

Lőrinc, university lecturer and translator

Pipi, Eszter’s fellow actor

Hella, Eszter’s fellow actor

Árvai, Eszter’s fellow actor

Ványa, Party-appointed theatre director

Ramocsay, sculptor

Note

néni (Auntie) and bácsi (Uncle) are used familiarly for non-relatives

a (as in Graff, Marton) is pronounced like the English salt, Baltic

c (as in Gyurica) is pronounced like ts

cs as in Ramocsay is pronounced like the English ch

g (as in Gizi) is always hard, as in good

j (as in Juli) is pronounced like the y in you

s (as in Ambrus) is pronounced as sh in English

sz (as in Eszter) is pronounced like the s in English"

Dates and places

Eszter is born c.1928 in the city of Szolnok in central Hungary

The Germans occupy Hungary in March 1944

Budapest is besieged by the Allies in the winter of 1944/45

In 1948 the Russians impose a puppet Communist regime

The action of the novel takes place in Budapest in 1954

THE FAWN

1

I wanted to be here sooner, but I had to wait for Gyurica and you know he’s always late; he said he’d be with me by nine but it was well after eleven when I saw him stepping through the door. Everyone thinks he’s a Party education worker or a person delivering Party leaflets, though he always has his doctor’s bag with him. He stopped in the middle of the courtyard, blinked several times, looked around for the number he had been called to, number 39; as soon as he spotted it the women left the gallery, shut their doors and went back into their kitchens; when he finally got inside he took a deep breath, mopped his brow and asked Gizi for a glass of water. As for my foot, it’s nothing serious, I just need to avoid walking on it and keep applying the cold compresses; the swelling won’t go for another twenty-four hours yet and no-one is going to ask me to jump down from a tree between now and then. As Puck says: Up and down, up and down, / I shall lead them up and down.

He didn’t mention you, not for reasons of tact, I think, but because he had nothing more to say – and what is there to say? He stared at Gizi, sitting at the table bolt upright with her hands on her knees, very much the mistress of the house. When he stood up she unfolded a fresh towel and handed it to him. The bed had been made but my bag and gloves were still there; he must have realised that I had spent the night there. Józsi’s walking stick and plastic raincoat were on the hanger, and his shaving brush and stick of soap were in full view on the shelf over the washstand. I was wearing Gizi’s dressing gown, the one with the huge flowers; she was already in her black dress, she’d been ironing her apron when he arrived. While he was examining my foot the cat, her enormous three-coloured tabby, came in from the corridor, padded over to him and rubbed its hair all over his trousers. When he left, Gizi scrubbed the bowl out as if it were infectious.

My first idea had been to spend the night on Margaret Island. I was alone all afternoon – Juli had gone off to church. I wrote her a note to say I was going to the Grand Hotel for the night, packed my bags and called a taxi. I stopped and paid the driver in Szabad Tér. I could hear music playing inside the hotel and I was just about to go in when they started folding up two of the awnings over the tables; it was sundown, they were cranking the long handles and the blue cloth was slowly folding up as the metal frames collapsed and closed shut. I caught a brief glimpse of the patch we had watched the upholsterer stitch on and I caught a sudden whiff of the storm that had torn it; I also saw the big glass window of the restaurant where we sat looking on in wonder as the rain rattled and crashed against the pane.

I turned round and went back into town. When I got to the flat I found Gizi sitting on the front steps with her dress pulled tightly down over her knees. She was waiting for me. It was her day off and she had come to ask if I would spend the night with her – we weren’t in the habit of explaining things to one another. She lives in one of these horrible Budapest blocks where every flat on the same floor opens out onto a central gallery – hers is number 39, but there’s also a 60, next to the steps going up to the attic; there’s a cage on a hook outside nearly every door, children screaming down in the courtyard, cooking smells coming out of the windows and the toilet doors in the communal washroom never close properly.

As I went into the building I stumbled against the waste bin and half an hour later my ankle had swollen again. I had supper lying in bed; Gizi had cooked some lángos – lángos with sour cream. There are two beds in her room, but she had made up only hers for us to sleep in. Juszti’s wedding photograph is on the wall above it, a very young-looking bride with her eyes lowered, holding a tiny spray of myrtle in her hand. I don’t know where she had sent Józsi, I didn’t want to ask.

Neither of us slept well – my foot was throbbing and Gizi kept getting up to change the compress. In the morning she went down to the grocery store and phoned for the doctor; the rest you know. After Gyurica had gone she called a taxi for me. She came with me to the square – it was only a hundred metres from the Swan. The flower sellers were sitting outside the gate; they called out to me but then left me alone. Once again I had lost my hairpins so I bought a dozen at a stall. As I was about to leave the square by the main gate I spotted a flowering tree leaning over the wall and stopped. I hadn’t noticed it there the day before, or hadn’t looked at it properly. I now realised that it was a bignonia.

Do you know what a bignonia is?

Father would have been able to give you its botanical name. I used to know it myself, it’ll come back to me soon. If you have ever been in Köves Street you would know what it looks like: a tall, twisted shrub, very aggressive, growing on a trellis, with flowers like hunting horns. The first time I went there to see Angéla she was standing on the fence, clinging on to the lattice-work with a red bignonia flower between her teeth.

Anyway I didn’t go in, I carried on towards the chapel. I was hobbling a bit now, I was wearing Gizi’s shoes, her feet are bigger than mine, but even so they were pinching and my big toe had started to throb. I took them off as soon as I got inside and tucked my feet under the kneeling board; the stone floor was nice and cool.

There was one other person in there, an old fellow, kneeling before the statue of St Antony. His lips were moving and his hands were clasped in prayer, the way Pipi did it in Joan of Arc, the perfect image of ardent devotion. When he had finished he tossed a coin into the purse, a twenty fillér piece; as soon as I got outside I burst into tears. Ványa was so fond of my melodious sobbings, he should have heard these strangled gaspings and heavings. I have no idea what I was crying about, I don’t think it was about you, or because it had been so dark in the chapel – I don’t know when I was last inside one. The red glow of the light in the sanctuary, the great floppy yellow roses on the altar to Mary – it was absolutely wonderful to be in there, unspeakably good. If I believed in God – if I believed in anything at all – it wouldn’t have been the same. I would have instantly leaped up and started pleading with the Heavens, I would have whined and whimpered and lamented and begged and pleaded and promised to do anything in return, and wept uncontrollably; but I knew there was no help to be had, and I didn’t want any anyway, so there was no point in asking: even if I could have brought myself to beg for it, it would still have been no good, I could never have undertaken to be a good girl and never to tell lies, I would simply have offloaded all my burdens onto Heaven, gone away with a shining face full of tears, and it would have cost me nothing; I would have been able to let myself go for a moment – and everything would have been even harder than before. So I really can’t explain why it was so unbelievably good just to be in there.

When I decided to leave I could barely stand the pain of trying to force Gizi’s shoe on the foot again; I couldn’t do up the laces – but I needn’t have worried, the swelling was so tight that it fell off. I got to the front gate but I didn’t want to go past the bignonia again, so I came in through the side gate. I hope nobody calls round, nobody who knows me. I’ve taken the shoes off now and I’m sitting here on the floor in my bare feet. There’s a slight breeze, just enough to stir the leaves on the trees outside, and there’s a beetle crawling along beside me, and now he’s reached my toes – a lovely slim-bodied beetle with blue wings. Father would identify him as Calosoma sycophanta and lift out of his way a peach pip that someone had spat out, and solemnly tell him, Go in peace, little traveller.

You really would have loved my father. I’ve never talked about him much. If I haven’t done so it’s because I never say much about anything, not about you or anyone else; as a child I was so quiet I never learned to talk very well. What it says on my CV is a pack of lies, the things people say about me are all lies, I lie so easily I could have made a career out of it. I have come to realise that if I can’t bear to speak the truth even to you then I am beyond all help.

But it is true, for example, that he would have chatted to the beetle and told him, Go in peace, little traveller, and that he would have squatted down next to him to say the words. It’s interesting: whenever I think about him I always see him squatting down like that, with his thin grey hair tousled over the dome of his beautifully formed forehead, gazing from behind his glasses at some insect or flower. I see a kind of dew on his brow – not horrible and sweaty, more like condensed steam, like when you breathe warm air onto a glass and it stays there for a while. When he died the moisture was still on his skin; I wiped it off with the palm of my hand; I had washed the handkerchiefs the night before, but they were still damp, it was winter and the wet washing was hanging in the attic and making cracking noises when it moved (all our best handkerchiefs came to us from Auntie Irma). Later I dried them over a coal fire for mother to wipe her tears on. I’ve never told you about Auntie Irma, and yet I wore her shoes for two whole years.

Have you ever noticed how, whenever we’re bathing somewhere, when I get out of the water I always put my sandshoes on straight away? I put my left foot on the pier and quickly bury the right one in the sandal. At Szolnok, when we went up to our room and you came in to join me, I wasn’t sitting normally on the bed with my legs stretched out, I was squatting on my heels. When you left me early next morning you laughed and said I was such a prude, because when you switched the light on to pick up your watch and your wallet, I pulled the bedcover over and hid my foot under it.

Pipi will have told you that I am certainly no prude. When the weather’s warm I am perfectly happy to go about undressed. But Pipi also knows that I have two large corns on my right foot, and they never go away, even when I have shoes specially made. You were so cross when I wouldn’t let you come with me to the shoemaker to try on the red ones with straps! I didn’t want you to see my right foot, and I didn’t want to tell you about Auntie Irma.

Yesterday it was my right foot that was swollen; I was wearing slippers when I showed it to Gyurica; today I’m wearing Gizi’s shoes, and it hurts every bit as much as it did when I was growing up, in the ones I had from Auntie Irma; her feet were as small as a child’s, and she took a childlike pride in their being so incredibly tiny.

One summer, when I was at secondary school, my foot burst out of one I was wearing. That evening I went to see Ambrus the bootmaker, to ask him for some thread to sew them up; he gave me the thread but wouldn’t let me do it, he sewed the soles to the uppers himself. What do I owe you? I asked him, and he said I should feed the pigs. So I dragged the swill out for the two great brutes and nearly broke my back lifting it over the fence; if I had gone inside and stood at the trough they would have knocked me onto the ground. I also had to sew a tear in his blue trousers, the ones he wears to the orchard on Sundays, and only then were we quits. I still thought he had put me to a great deal of work for a stupid bit of thread.

When I got home I was still barefoot, carrying the shoes in my hand. Father was in the garden. We must get her some shoes, he said, and Mother sighed. That’s true. I just went into the kitchen to see what there was for supper. We should get her some shoes! Well of course we should. But I finished the school year just as I was: still no shoes.

That evening Auntie Irma called round. Father was already in bed, so Mother took out the cherry wine that he wasn’t allowed to drink; she didn’t drink it either, she just made a show of doing so, and when the guest had left she carefully poured the untouched contents of the glass back into the silver-plated carafe, drop by drop. Auntie Irma was very fond of me; she would hug me and stroke me, and give me lumps of sugar. I put up with the caresses like a little whore, watching her to see if she was going to give me money. She didn’t often do that – almost never, in fact – but she almost always gave me presents. That evening it was a coral necklace, because I was a big girl now, a pupil at the gymnázium, and she hung it round my neck with a kiss. I stared at her in amazement. If we sold it to the jeweller he might put it in his window and she would know. Clear coral! I didn’t even have a decent skirt. I slid down out of her embrace; I could no longer bear her petting and her intimacy.

I was still standing beside the table in my pinafore, with pigswill smeared on the hem, my toes sticking out of the front of my shoes – and this coral necklace glowing around my neck. Irma looked me up and down, then asked what I would be wearing to the school start-of-term ceremony. Mother gave another sigh. The school specified three sorts of uniform and I didn’t have a single one of them. She avoided answering, she just stammered out something. Auntie Irma’s stupid little eyes brightened with pleasure; she stretched out her foot, compared it with my bare one, then pulled off her shoes behind the tasselled tablecloth and tried on one of mine: it was slightly too big for her and she was filled with pride and joy. She asked Mother not to be offended, because they were relatives – first cousins in fact – and she loved me like her own child, but since we happened to be so very similar in the size of our feet she would like to send me some of her shoes to wear at the ceremony; she got bored with them very quickly, she was forever buying new ones and the old ones were left to dry out in the wardrobe. I looked at her feet; she was wearing beautiful yellow shoes with slightly raised heels, they were very small and very showy, like toy shoes. Mother lowered her eyes and looked away.

The next day I received a pair of black ones; they had buckskin insoles and were done up with buttons on one side. I wore a plain white dress to the ceremony; it was a windy, rainy September afternoon, the rest of the class were in their regulation dark blue uniforms, buttoned up to the neck, and even then some of them were cold. I was well hardened, like a little bear, but on the way to the church I felt thoroughly fed up, limping along in my horrible buttoned-up shoes. My form mistress called me to one side; she had a message for my mother: she should buy me a pair of proper girl’s shoes and not this flashy sort designed for grown-ups. I asked her if the school was prepared to provide me with a pair, so she asked me my name, and when I didn’t answer she turned bright red and dropped the subject. The school had been founded by my great-grandfather, it’s named after him, Moses Encsy Gymnázium; I went there on a scholarship, in my side-buttoned shoes.

After a year it became apparent that Auntie Irma’s right foot was half a size smaller than her left. At the start it had simply hurt when I walked in them; after a while I could only hobble along, and then not even manage that. Mother was in tears every evening when I washed them and she saw my toes growing twisted and swollen. By then I had four pairs of the shoes, each one smaller than the last. When my aunt died, my first feeling was one of relief that she would be sending me no more of them. Mother had always believed that she would leave everything to me – the apartment, the furniture and her clothes – but she died without making a will and her younger brother packed it all up and cut us out completely.

The next day I went back to Ambrus and got him to cut the fronts off. Open-fronted shoes were not in fashion at the time; Father went white when I arrived home in these butchered ones with my toes poking out in my torn stockings. I carried on wearing them to school for a while, then the form mistress bought a pair with money from some religious foundation and showed them to me after school. I kissed her hand and asked what I should do in return. From then on I was allowed to go to the boarding school and help the third-years memorise their lessons.

By the way, that rehearsal that had been arranged at the china factory was cancelled. I didn’t mind one way or the other, the whole thing was to have been very short anyway; I walked home, Pipi went with me as far as the theatre; I felt perfectly contented, looking at the displays in the shop windows, and on the ring road I bought an ice cream cornet. When I got back Juli wasn’t there; I had no intention of asking her to leave her flat and come over, so I took out a book, lay down for a while, then got up in some agony to make a cup of coffee. I was grinding the beans when I caught a whiff of the aroma and then suddenly I didn’t want any . . . You were sitting there in front of me on the kitchen stool, working the grinder and laughing: I had remembered that time when I had to do a two-night show in Pécs; when I arrived I had to struggle across the snow to get to the taxis, I hadn’t seen you since the morning, and I hate working when you aren’t somewhere close by; when I got to the rank I saw you standing there, next to the driver, eating a croissant; you sat beside me in the cab and announced that it was time to go and have a cup of coffee.

I left the kitchen, sat down at the desk and started to draw up my CV, it was the ninth time I had been asked do this since I joined the theatre. I wrote down my name, started to doodle and drew some fish and a goose; then I needed to blow my nose, so I went to the wardrobe and took out three handkerchiefs. I pulled out the medicine drawer, because once again that stupid catch had caught one of my fingers, and behind the boxes of medicines and rolls of gauze I discovered some liqueur cherries with the word aspirin that you had written on the label; I had no idea when you could have done that. I immediately got dressed and set off for Margaret Island.

The CV should have been handed in today, I had been called in by the new Personnel Manager. He could have recited everything about me without looking at it. Dezső Encsy, he would begin, so your father was a lawyer . . . And what would have happened if I told him that, properly speaking, in the commonly understood sense of the word, he wasn’t? What sort of lie would that be taken for? Of course my father was a lawyer. My mother spent the whole day sitting at the piano turning over the sheets of music, there was music in our house from morning to night, exotic plants grew in the space between the windows in the office and my father sat gazing in awe at the chalice of an epiphyllum.

My mother had a triple-barrelled surname: Katalin Marton von Ercsik von Táp von Szentmarton. In the middle of the music stand there was a shiny porcelain miniature of the young Mozart, in his little wig and sky-blue costume. I once stole some eggs from a peasant.

During the war the house we lived in was destroyed by a bomb; I’ve always wanted to show you the place without your knowing that – I would have loved to watch your face and hear what you said when