In the days before DDT, Budapest was a town of bedbugs. Mother believed that the house was built from used bricks: this was her explanation for how, in a house of clean and orderly burghers, this nocturnal insect could colonize the bedrooms. Paul did not know how the neighbours coped with the problem, although he did see visits of specialists in gassing. (Cyanide was the poisonous agent. For it to work, and for the burghers to survive, the latter had to move out for a week. All doors and windows were sealed with brown sticking paper, telltale signs that the inhabitants have lost a battle and decided to call in mercenary forces--alas Paul's family could not afford to vacate the flat for seven days, seven peple for seven days in a hotel was too huge an expense even to be comtemplated.)
The Lehners have thus developed their own startling strategy to deal with the arthropod invasion. Incidentally, the niche for the bedbugs in the domestic ecology would have been secure--as one got used to their bite; they were hunted not because of a physical but rather because of the aesthetic harm to the Lehners, a bedbug stinks, the scent of a large colony of bedbugs is quite penetrating. Bedbug bites also bleed and thus the bedding becomes stained, and in those thrifty days, bedsheets were changed once a month, by which time they looked like material patterned with variously shaded red dots. True, the smell could be squashed by stronger scents, (and there were many) and one did not have to show the bedding to guests who came for tea, but the real devastation to middle-class pride and sense of beauty arose from the bedbugs' habit of depositing their excreta onto walls--they are cleanly creatures and they do not like to soil their abode. Living under pictures, for instance, if overcome by the urge to defecate, they will wander off a little distance from the frame, and do the needful. There were plenty of pictures in the Lehner's flat: either family photos or faint and poor reproductions of great art. Bedbugs living under Boticelli's Spring polluted the perimeter of the silvery frame, as they tried to avoid soiling their own habitat. Ironically, bedbug cleanliness triggered bedbug persecution, largely because these brownish circles around pictures could not be hidden from visitors. Most of the family's friends had, of course, bedbugs in their own flats and houses, but these matters were not discussed, evidence was hidden as much as this could be done, for instance by putting the same pictures into larger and larger frames from time to time. Shame and embarrassment, the constant movers of burgherly action even tried to edit out of reality the word "bedbug" and Paul's young brother Steve was told--to make sure that he did not inadvertedly promulgate classified information--that those little things he saw scurrying about were "moths".
The ultimate Lehner stragegy was the monthly cooperative of the bedbug hunt. Father took a day off from work and appeared for breakfast in the attire he reserved for shoe-cleaning and bedbug-hunting: an unbelievably old pair of trousers and a similarly ancient, but much tattier, shirt. After breakfast, the attack started in the parents' bedroom. All furniture was moved, the beds were taken apart, the pictures were taken from the walls, and the hunt proper began in earnest. Mother and sister Theresa each carried a little rectangular soapdish filled with water in their left hand, and a small stiff wire (the type used to poke the roast to determine how tender it is) in their right. Poking the wire into the holes and cracks and recesses of the wall, they made the bedbugs emerge: the quarry in flight was then knocked, with a quick flick of the wire, into the waterfilled soapdish to drown. This method of hunting was tedious and required dexterity. If one poked about with the wire too much one damaged the walls, in particular one had to be careful not to make the holes for the nails on which the pictures hung bigger. Squashing the bugs in flight was forbidden, not because this was considered unsportsmanlike, but squashing bedbugs on the wall would have made the walls look like the bedsheets, as changing time approached. A further problem was the soapdish with water, and a steady hand was required to avoid scratching and splashing the wall. Not surprisingly, the sport was dangerous--and also rather loud. One of the ladies covering the upper regions and standing on a ladder may just have disturbed a group of bedbugs (is it a covey, a herd, a school, or a pack?) hiding in a hole around the nail on which a lustreless replica of Raphael's Madonna della sedia hung: the bugs took flight, scattered in all directions, and could they run! Sometimes a dry painting brush was used to wipe the running game from the wall into the vessel of death.
Father was in charge of chemical warfare and his main concerns were the breeding colonies. Most of these colonies were found in the complicated inner mechanism of the beds. These beds were wooden structures, except for the linkages between the headpiece and footpiece and the sideboards. These linkages were metallic slots accommodating metallic hooks and behind the slotted plate of bluish metal was ample space for a thriving hatchery: eggs and hatchlings in various stages of development as evidenced by size and colour and consistency sheltered here. As these metal plates were screwed to the hard wood, all plates had to be unscrewed every month. The hiding places having been uncovered, turpentine was spread in all the corners and nooks. This task required much circumspection, as turpentine could spoil the carefully polished parket floor by dissolving the wax which generations of maids had brushed into the floor. Therefore, thick layers of newspaper had to be laid down first--the nations' Catholic conservative daily thus finding transient use, transient, because this multifarious resource, newsprint, was gathered again in the evening, stored in the cellar and used for many other things before it found its penultimate role in the complicated task of lighting the fire in the stove in the bathroom.
Paul's job was to help Father to disassemble the beds, keep the eight screws for each plate (four plates to each bed, two beds in the room) properly identified, as each screw had to be replaced in its original hole, this procedure having been thought to be beneficial to the preservation of hole and screw. Paul was also responsible for the hot pursuit of escaping bedbugs, as there were some who tried to avoid death by turpentine by dropping to the floor. These had to be squashed. But the body of a fully grown bedbug is hard to squash, particularly for a child and particularly against the multilayered carpet of the conservative daily. A hammer had to be used. But then again, a metal headed hammer in the hand of an excited juvenile hunter could do damage to the floor, newspaper carpet or not, and so the hammer was a wooden one with a large head.
The hunters rested for a break at mid-morning, devouring well deserved sandwiches on the battlefield. Then work continued. The hunt in the parents' bed-room took all morning, not only because of the complicated beds with the 64 screws and those wooden springs, ten to a bed, resting on wooden cylinders, the latter slotted into the sideboards--and in Paul's family it was a rule that each individual piece in the flat had to be put back where it came from, nothing was interchangeable, in fact the very idea of interchangeability was despicable! The hunt in this room was time consuming because the largest number of bedbugs were here. Mother's theory was that this peculiarity of distribution was the result of the lack of concern on the part of the neighbours whose bedroom adjoined. This lack of concern was also manifest in their leaving the radio blaring (in spite of the fact that the Lehners had no radio, this blaring was only welcome if there was an operatic programme or some sensational news was to be expected) but then these unconcerned neighbours were used to doing everything loudly, had enormous arguments using foul language and on occasions, in fact quite frequently, made groaning and laughing and sighing noises, accompanied by a lot of creaking noises which apparently are made by inconsiderate neighbours and are rather difficult to explain to children. According to this theory of Mother's, the neighbours were the indescribably dirty people with bedbugs and we only had the overspill from the neighbours' bedbug sanctuary. These neighbours--a police captain and his idle, childless wife--never did anything about these bedbugs, Mother said, explaining, yet again, her theory of the gradient between rooms. Paul never believed in this theory, however often it was proposed, whenever there was talk of bedbugs or of the neighbours. Probably, Paul thought, the bedbugs prefer the blood of children. For one thing, their bedsheets were more spotted than those of the adults, but then they all slept in the parental bedroom at that time. They slept on cumbersomely folding metal beds, which required the cooperation of two persons to unfold and position every evening and to fold and store in a corner every morning. (Always the metal feet on feltpads, like beermats to protect the precious floor.) Also, in that very room was the real bedbug sanctuary: the 200-year-old black clock with its brass pendulum. Like the temple of Vesta in ancient Rome, if a culprit made it to the sanctuary, it escaped unhurt. Even bedbugs rushing towards the old clock were not in peril as everyone was so afraid to disturb the clock. There was the explanation that some time in the prehistoric beginnings of the family, in times not remembered by Paul, during an early hunt, the clock was taken off the wall. It took Father several months to adjust that clock after this disturbance, he had to balance it again by putting little wedges of wood and paper behind it. This clock was the master clock in the house, losing a minute in the week during the winter and gaining about the same amount during the summer. Also, of course, the location of this clock allowed it to be adjusted and checked as the noon time signal came from the neighbours' radio every Sunday, through the same wall through which, according to Mother, the bloodsucking insects invaded.
By midday the parents' bedroom was reassembled. Clean sheet, clean pillowcases tonight!--in Paul's memory the pleasure of clean bedlinen is inseparable from the smell of turpentine. Lunch. A hunter's lunch. Quick good lunch for hard workers. Then the troops parted, Father and Paul attacking the grandparents' bedroom, and the ladies the pictures in the drawing room and the lobby.
The grandparents' bedroom did not harbour many colonies of bedbugs, perhaps because their blood was not sweet, but salty, thought Paul. Also, the beds were more easily broken down, no screws to worry about. In the early days the drawing room and the lobby were not much of a problem. There were rows of pictures, photographs: each one of the children as a naked baby, then in the pram, later as a toddler holding a ball; all pictures taken in the studio of Master Rosbaud, all made with the same mysterious, large, black, cloth covered camera and the actual exposure--after a lot of posturing and excitement--consisted of taking the lens cover off, and replacing it again whilst everyone held his breath. (Because of the lack of cooperation, the baby pictures were never sharp giving rise to a new style.) As there were many pictures in the drawing room and the hall, there was shelter, but there were not many bedbugs because there was no food for them. For the lack of sleeping mammals in these rooms, the habitat was unattractive to bedbugs in spite of the abundance of shelter. Or so it was in the beginning. As the children grew it became undesirable that they sleep in the parents' bedroom, and they had to be segregated according to sex. Now the metal beds had to be unfolded in the evening in the drawing room and the lobby--the old carpet having been carefully rolled up. Paul's first observations of population dynamics, habitat, dispersal, migration according to resources were made at this time, suddenly there were more bedbugs in the drawing room, there was a population explosion under the picture of Our Lady of Lourdes--and breeding grounds were established in a number of suitable places, although the frame of the metal bed itself was never found to harbour a single bedbug. Still, the paternal bedroom remained the most densely populated area. Paul was too young to ponder whether tradition and ecology are complementary.
By mid-afternoon on bedbug hunting days, the stove in the bathroom was fired so as to provide a bath for the sweaty, tired hunters. By dinnertime, the children counted the slain bedbugs, the weapons were cleaned and put away, even the newspapers, somewhat soaked, were folded and ready to be taken to the cellar. The furniture was back in place, the beds were reassembled, everything was clean and new. So were the children. Paul sat at dinner on such days in his pyjamas, rolled into a wollen blanket, his freshly washed hair covered with a huge woollen turban. These precautions, to avoid pneumonia and meningitis, were necessary because the windows and the doors were all open. There was a devilish draft in an attempt to diminish the turpentine smell.
On these evenings after the bedbug hunt, the exhausted children went to bed without demur. Whilst Paul tried to find in the clean and therefore cold bed a cozy way to lie down, he could hear the splashing and snorting and gurgling noises which he later in life learned to associate with hippo schools--which noise, however, in those days, came from the bathroom where Father was the last of the family to set to scrubbing.
On these evenings, Paul was asleep before Mother came to say the evening prayer, although, as he grew older, he used to notice the touch of her tender finger with which she traced the Sign of the Cross on his brow.