Péter Esterházy

Celestial Harmonies

(Excerpts from the novel)

8

When Menyus Tóth entered the Roisin salon to announce that the Communists were here, Father gave Grandmother's belly a horrendous kick. Not to worry: from the inside.
The kicking of an expectant mother's belly by her infant from inside, that's legitimate kitsch: the belly-what's more, a bulging belly!; the cards stirring, in a version with more finesse, the winning card tumbling to the floor; touched to the quick, the paternal hand throbs in unison-there's no cheap anecdote that won't do the trick. From the other side, and in the spirit of the fourth commandment (of ten), it is (of course) to be frowned upon.
I am against it too, personally. True, I have hardly hit anyone in all my life.
I could count the number of times on one hand. It'd hardly take more fingers than the usual five. Even if I were to add those I'd have liked to hit, and not just theoretically, like I'm going to do a fast csárdás on Big Huszár, or give Brezhnev a punch in the nose, but when overtaken with rage and humiliation, from which only one path seems to lead, when the muscles are strained to breaking point-even then the number isn't much greater. And, needless to say, I was never even close to hitting my mother or my father. Actually, yes, father once. But that was ages ago. Besides, he was smashed out of his skull, so it's like it wasn't him at all. It's not like that. When I slapped him-but no, it wasn't a slap, it was worse, it was kicking, the rough-and-tumble butting of heads, etcetera, and frozen in close-up, just like in a film, we stared each other down: no two ways about it, that was him and that was me. The fact that I was right confused me. Was.

15

The same thing happens to me that happens to everybody studying their family tree. I realize how little I know about my ancestors. But then we always know little about them, just the little we know, there's little we can discover about them, regardless of the particular family and the availability of documents; all that we can successfully discover every time is that our grandfather was a stern and dignified old gentleman with a goatee, and virtuous, his seven children are proof to that.
And there's another thing to consider... it's not like we simply conjure up the past, strolling inside it at leisure, taking an objective survey. It's not like that, because the present is always aggressive... submerging itself in the murky
waters of the distant past only to surface with whatever will enhance its
present shape. Possibly, I am not even conjuring up my past so much as devouring it, I- who am that I am now-making an exclusive claim: on myself.
To live is to make up a past for ourselves. (Saying, courtesy of grandfather.)

17

Thanks to my father's perfectly timed kick, Grandmother assumed that Menyus Tóth was saying that the Communists were in her belly. That's why the look of alarm. Besides, how did her servant know? "These people always know everything." Grandmother always knew her duty, and expected the same of others. That's why she appeared to be on her own-because she belonged not to people, but to her duty. The other thing that set her apart from the human beings I knew was her implicit belief in God. She believed in the Lord, the way only people living hundreds of years ago could. How do I know? I don't.

18

I got a call once from a madman who started telling me that the Kádár regime settled inside his mother's womb, but I mustn't think he's a madman because of that.
"What an idea!"
He sounded pretty convincing. It wasn't the first time that the thought had occurred to me too, that a dictatorship must surely change the body, too-we end up growing two noses, or webs between our fingers. Actually, it wasn't inside his mother, but his father. His father's guts. That's why he joined the police. Fighting for the regime that ruined him. Because his father had sacrificed himself. And for what? For nothing. Because to join the police is a sacrifice, isn't that right, and not the traffic police, if you get my drift. I do, I said. He thought he was talking to my father, not a child.
"Why are you telling me this?"
Swearing like a stevedore, he slammed down the phone.

19

So then, my grandmother's first thought was of the Lord, because she always thought of Him first. Then of what she had to do. Which at the moment was kicking around inside her.
"Have you gone mad?! Menyus?!"
When grandmother was angry, there was no knowing whether she was asking a question or making a statement.
"Who are where?!"
Being reluctant to let the horrible word pass his lips yet again, the faithful servant merely waved an arm behind his back, making faces into the bargain. Grandmother nodded significantly.
"You really are mad. What a shame."
The faithful servant continued to shake his head, feverishly, with near annoyance, as if he were playing a game of twenty questions with his mistress, who was incapable of finding the right direction. The information was so preposterous, Grandmother lost no time in giving it credence. Even if poor Tóth had lost his senses, he can't be that mad. There are things we cannot conceive of, even if we let go of the hand of the rational. The hand of the rational, I heard this a lot afterwards.
She stepped over to the wide window. From here you could see the park that stretched into the distance in front of the cha^teau (or the back, there were
various schools of thought on the subject contending with each other), for a while meandering in place in front of the huge, unpleasantly neo-classical building, then surreptitiously and leisurely disappearing among the peaks of the Vértes. The mistress of the cha^teau was not my grandmother, but her mother-in-law, the "old Excellency", whom I was to meet later on, when we were forcibly resettled. That's where she died. For weeks before her death, she lay without moving. She had only one gesture left to her: if she had to yawn, she put her hand up to her lips; she kept this gesture until her death, the universal embarrassment.
My father's birth-because he's going to be born even though he's helplessly kicking around inside now like a crypto-Communist-brought Grandmother her independence when the family moved to the cha^teau at Majk, originally intended as a hunting lodge.
Grandmother was short on kindness. This made the tough even tougher, her requests sounded like orders, though her orders never turned into commands. On the other hand, her consistency made her actions calculable, reliable, and this, coupled with her natural willingness to help, at times gave the appearance of kindness, all the same.
Speaking of appearances, there was nothing aristocratic about her to the eye, even though both her parents were Károlyis ("your grandmother is impeccably Károlyi"), and also, as far as being short, she was short on any need for pleasure (she complied with the Victorian advice about love-making to "close your eyes and think of England" without any effort), she cared not a jot for beauty, she cared not a jot for good food, she was not in contact with the world of the
senses, my grandmother didn't even have a body, except when she gave birth.
"Have you ever given birth, Menyus?"
Menyus turned red. He loved my grandmother very much, even though he had no inkling at the time that the second child, my father's younger brother, would be given the same name as his. Love is not the right word; he didn't dare love her; let's put it this way: he had emotional respect for her.
"Because I'm about to."
"No, you're not, Your Excellency, you're not going into labour yet."
"Then what would you say I'm doing?!"
"You are talking to me." And he turned red again. "I'm sorry, but you mustn't go into labour now, it's not the time." And he pointed behind him once again, but this time with his head, like when they're pulling the bit on a horse. Grandmother gave an impatient wave of the hand.
"What have you got against the Communists anyway?"
"Me, Your Excellency?" said the abashed valet. He wanted to say that they're not talking about him now, but he kept mum, because they never talked about him. I wouldn't be surprised if at the bottom of her heart my grandmother were a Communist. One thing is for sure; in every sphere of life, she strove for equality. But no, this may be misleading; my grandmother was no revolutionary, she was a lady of rank, but she judged people by the same standard. She probably didn't think that existence determines consciousness. Of course, if existence does determine consciousness, she couldn't have thought this to begin with.
"Menyus," grandmother said, thereby putting an end to this highly irregular chat, "go and have the carriage harnessed so I can be in time for the express to Tata. And stop that ridiculous pointing. As for you, son," she put in severely for the benefit of my infant father, "you will have to wait," though actually, she said what Faust said to the moment of his happiness, to wit, tarry, my son, tarry, it is better for you inside, and pushing her bulging belly before her, she made her way out of the Roisin salon.

20

My father did as he was told and stayed inside the pleasant darkness for yet another week or so. The last peaceful week of his life. The last week of freedom. He waited for them to declare the glorious Republic of Councils...
His life set off with more complications than our family is used to. A new Esterházy life slips into this world as effortlessly as if everything and everyone had been waiting just for this, as if there had been a void in nature, a hole, a deficit, a no waiting for a yes, a wound-a light scrape-, which, just like the new shoot, appears, as if from the heavens, softly, unaccompanied by pain, healed. Order is restored. The serfs dance by the bright light of the bonfires, in the palace, palaces, cut crystal glasses clink against each other; priestly hands, chaplains' hands and bishops' hands are clasped in prayers of thanksgiving.
The way new films were advertised in the cinemas: Coming! Coming! Coming! How much attention and attentiveness, work and planning preceded the new arrival! They were concerned for the newcomer, and they were concerned for themselves, and so midwives, barber-surgeons, nannies, priests and, last but not least, lawyers crowded around the event in droves. This time, though, there were no droves.
It being a turning point of epic proportions, I heard it said many times and also read in the family records that my father was the first Esterházy for centuries to be born without rank and means. Without rank and means, the family kept saying with obvious relish, with pride if not outright hauteur: see?, we even managed this, not only are we replete with rank and means, one of us even managed the opposite. Of course, they said this only afterwards; they thought back on these few official days as a joke that was past its time, a historical scherzo. They had no idea at the time how easily one can get used to such jokes, how well we'd fare without rank and means, that my father was simply the first of a long line. His rumpled swaddling-clothes marked the end, the end of the afore-mentioned centuries, except no one knew this at the time. The finality of the last moment is seen for what it is only from the vantage point of the moment after the last, and thus by definition, too late.

129

When in May 1951 the forced resettlements started in Budapest, my parents took it all in stride; there was no need to worry or be unduly alarmed; it was just the usual thing all over again; if all is lost, there is nothing to lose, which is a freedom of sorts. But at the very least, it gives you the illusion of freedom. Though I hadn't lost anything yet personally, I was not worried either, nor unduly alarmed, because I thought-and what else could I have thought?- that this was the way of the world, it's what life is all about, they come and drag you screaming from your crib, strangers come, scream at you, packing, scurrying about, the dark of night, a truck, the gasoline fumes; then more strangers, more screaming, my father's impassive countenance, mother's tears, then the tears stop, she does not cry any more, or only rarely, and if this is the natural way of the world, what's the use of worrying or feeling alarmed?
I had no idea when I first laid eyes on it that Budapest was the city of fear. Fear held my native city in thrall, there was nothing but this fear, the winding Castle streets, the promenades, the foul outskirts and elegant avenues ("the
avenues that once bore the name of your uncles"), everything; with its "hideous, colossal, festering ass" fear and trembling had settled over the city. My crib offered a spectacular view of Blood Meadow and the Castle. A choice spot. My first home was a villa in Buda situated on a steep lot, as if the house had grown out of the ground not far from the steps named after our King Csaba, on the side of the hill that bore the name of the ill-fated traitor Martinovics.
After the convent where they had been given room and board, and which,
unless I'm much mistaken, was financed by us, the family, was closed down, great-grandmother Schwarzenberg and Aunt Mia also came to live with us. The ubiquitous dark glasses that Aunt Mia wore enhanced, rather than hid, her beauty. A famous actress trying to hide. Like that. Yet there was nothing of the actress in her, and her beauty, too, had faded (or always had been faded, which is a contradiction, of course); no man ever spoke to her as a man; the only bond of affection she held was for her brother, my grandfather; she wanted to devote her life to him, but he wouldn't have it. Wouldn't hear of it. Entering a convent seemed the logical thing to do, but she didn't want to dedicate herself even to Christ, either as his servant or betrothed; she didn't have enough warmth of heart even for that. Which left pecuniary support. In her desperation Aunt Mia attempted to hide her lack of warmth, hide it behind kindness. To no avail. Whereupon equally desperate, we, children, did everything to reassure her that we loved her. Our mutual desperations were a fine match for each other, I think. On the other hand, she had the softest hands in the whole wide world. Like a weak little bird's, we took hold of her hands; she did not object, and we slid it up and down our cheeks. Meanwhile, she was supposed to be teaching us German.

131

For a long time I was under the impression that the evil piece of paper that arrived on June 16 1951 asking us if we would kindly oblige the authorities by getting the hell out of our home in twenty-four hours and showing up at our newly designated place of residence, which brought with it not only the moral benefit of teaching the enemy of the people, that being yours truly (the eviction papers were accidentally addressed to me, but my parents pretended not to notice) a lesson, but a more practical benefit as well, since it made a pleasant apartment free and available, concretely for the people, and more concretely, for Comrade J.G., may the pox take him.
In short, everyone stood to benefit; we regained our moral balance, while the people, etc., etc.
June 16th is the correct date, but so is July 16th, it being the last day of evictions. The very last. Which means that they dangled a carrot in front of my parents' nose, as a result of which the worst that could happen in a dictatorship happened: they started hoping.
But this never happened again.

136

My mother was brought up with an eye to practicality. Granny put the girls to work. They learned to cook early on, and though cleaning was the servants' job, for half a year they had to see to it ("you must learn, dear, what to expect of the staff"), household chores plus culture, religion and public education, with a bit of dancing thrown in, they knew everything young ladies of breeding were expected to know.
Father, too, was brought up for the same thing, for life. Except, they were brought up for a different sort of life; being forcibly resettled was simply not conceivable to either as a possible life-style. Their upbringing did not contradict the view that this was the best of all possible worlds, it's just that they never thought that what came to pass could be possible.
If anything saved my mother, it was not her education, nor her steadfastness, nor her fortitude or sense of responsibility, but her innate sense of good taste, the refinement she was born with and which she regarded as part of creation- and which she insisted on forever after with effortless ease and single-mindedness of purpose. Respect for form prevailed even in Bogyikó-and it worked fine for some time-but this refinement lacked the individual touch. My beautiful aunt was not much for hype, exercising caution in all things, even in her truly breathtaking beauty. Life gave Mother a tranquil life, but that was hers lock, stock, and barrel.
These are her own napkins, her place mats painted with her own two hands, her seating cards, her hand-written menus (the legendary cardboard menu cards from the very bottom of life, elegant, and in French, Hort, 26.4.1951, Grandfather's banquet for his 70th birthday, on the veranda, carré de porc rôti, because Aunt Rozi got us pork from an illegal butchering; and the horrid bull's blood, the Château Torro Rosso!), her unobtrusive, refined way of speaking- these saved the family from a decline of sorts. Which is an understatement. (It saved it from nothing.) Father took all this in stride. Having been surrounded by refinement all his life, he couldn't care less. Couldn't appreciate it. Didn't even notice it. He regarded my mother's ambition, the forthright individuality of her refinement, with mistrust. Had he a grain of pride in him, it would have been with condescension.
My father never looked down on anyone, that's how he was an aristocrat. My grandfather looked down on everyone, that was his way of being an aristocrat.
As for me, I just keep blinking.

138

The proletarian dictatorship intended forcible resettlement as a cunning move which would make the peasantry allied to the working class loathe the rotten to the core ruling class which had oppressed it for centuries even more, at long last, as prescribed by regulation, but the move backfired.
On the contrary. They were overcome by a feeling of undifferentiated solidarity. ("Go kneel in the second pew countin' from the confessional, you'll find something there, for a quick Lord's Prayer." "You never ate so much chicken in your lives, simpletons, as back then.") For instance, without thinking twice about it, they blamed the awkward circumstance of having to put up with strangers living under one roof with them on the Communists, or saw it as an honour.
As a result, they gave us their best room, the so-called clean room, whereas theoretically we should have lived (atoned for our sins) in the shed attached to the house, a shed that was full of chicken shit and resisted any attempt at
heating. Indeed, when the inspector showed up, he did not neglect to mention the fact.
"There's plenty 'a room all around," Uncle Pista said, and avoided looking the man from the council in the eye.
"Have it your way, Simon," the young man retorted impertinently, "but beware of the consequences!"
These people couldn't get a sentence out edgewise without making it sound like a threat. Pass the salt. I have a headache. It's your turn to take the boy to school today. Your uncle was shot today. However, this was more a matter of habit than outright malice, because in fact they did intimidate people all the time, regardless of what they were saying, thinking, or the lies they were telling. That's dictatorship: the certainty of intimidation and the certainty of fear, i + f, intimidation plus fear, that's dictatorship for you, but not like one half of the nation intimidating the other half, or the powers that be intimidating everyone, because there's something contingent upon all this, a howling, terrifying uncertainty, for the one who is intimidating is also afraid, and the one being intimidated intimidates others in turn, the strictly delineated roles are obscured to the outer limits, everyone intimidates and everyone fears, and all the time there are executioners and there are victims, and the two are clearly distinguishable, the one from the other.
There was a time when seven of us had to make do-and so we made do- with the spacious twenty-five square metres of the "clean" room. Using a grey blanket, we divided the room in two, with the realm in the back, beyond the blanket (beyond the Seven Seas) being grandfather's, the whole thing, and his alone, which everyone seemed to think was only fair. So did he. I'm not sure Mother did, but she was afraid to say so. Grandfather was not a man to be defied. (Of course, that depends on what we mean by defied, because human defiance on a grand scale cannot be checked.)
Uncle Pista Simon and family (including defiant Aunt Rozi) were afraid even to address him. To address words to him. Whereas compared to his usual self, grandfather had turned into a warm hearted, kind old gentleman. When he engaged his "hosts" in conversation, sticking to factual, general subjects on agriculture, they ran away, bashfully hiding their faces. Grandfather shook his head, he never did figure out what he'd done wrong.
Everyone called Mother by her first name. They didn't think of her as a gentleman or gentlewoman, not even a lady (though that she was, as far as that went), but first and foremost, as a mother. To prove the point, there I was, wailing; besides, by then she was carrying my younger brother, or else was in a blessed state, it was too early to determine which. My father they just called Professor. Uncle Pista opted for Count, but Father talked him out of it. The old man chewed this over, then smiled. Fine.
"What are you laughing at, Pista, old friend?"
"Nothing, Professor." And Pista winked at the word 'professor'.
"Only a fool would laugh at nothing, ain't that true, Pista, old friend?"
"That's very true, Professor." Whereupon another wink followed.
"Something must've gotten in your eye, old friend," father said pointedly, whereupon a silence ensued. "So then, old friend, tell us what that nothing's supposed to be, or else ... Get my drift?"
The old man let out a chuckle and quickly brought his hand up to hide his lips.
"Sure, sure... Professor."
They talked as if they were afraid of being overheard. Uncle Pista circled round and round what he would not say, and enjoyed it, while father, as if he were stuck inside an old Transylvanian ballad, tried his hand at some imaginary peasant tongue, talking the way people used to talk when they told jokes about the Széklers in Pest. Meanwhile, the old kulak laughed up his sleeve, thinking he'd gotten the better of the secret police, because even though he said professor, he was thinking count.
"Besides, seeing how we all feel the same way in the village," and he winking again, "we all say professor, in which case this professor also means count, but they can't have nothin' on us, 'cause we all say professor!"
On a purely linguistic plane Uncle Pista was right-the faultless implementation of a good thought-they can't have anything on you. Later on, though, it became evident to all concerned that they can always have something on you, and do have something on you. Uncle Pista, too, was soon arrested on some fabricated charge, not that a dictatorship needs fabricated charges, or only rarely; what they need is fabricated laws, the kind that can't be adhered to,
and who decides whether they're being adhered to or not? What impressive scope for action!
He was behind bars for a year. When he was released, he was no longer laughing. He was weeping.
"Look what they done to me, Professor" he said, holding his hands up to my father. My father saw nothing out of the ordinary. Nice, strong peasant hands. "They're white, Professor, white! I can't bear the shame!"
Uncle Pista hadn't worked for a year, and his hands looked it, this is what he was showing my father, this shame. By then my father had proper, tanned, rough, muscular hands. His fingers were so strong, you could use them for a swing. We held on to his index finger-our hands could hardly encircle it-as he swung us back and forth.
My brother was born in September. People came to look at him. He had the biggest head on him you ever saw. It came with him. Then in December, at the age of ninety, Great-grandmother died.
She had a silver walking stick with a hippopotamus head (Uncle Charlie brought it from Africa, or so they said, along with his chronic scrofulous conjunctivitis, both a gift from some minor king); when she tapped it, we had to run to her and kneel, or whatever. She used to sit on a throne-like chair, and we had to kiss her hand.
"Stop pawing me, I'm not dying."
In the end, she got a stroke. She was conscious of what was going on around her, and she understood what we were saying, but the line of communication between her thoughts and her words had been severed. She tried her best, though. One day at lunch she looks at me and says, "Pass me the salt." I pass the salt, her face is drenched in sweat, her trembling hand begins to gesticulate, her eyes fill with tears, and she keeps saying, "Not that! The salt! The salt!"
I was filled with terror and pity and, bewildered, glanced at Aunt Mia, who looked after Great-grandmother. Biting her pale lips, Aunt Mia first stared into space, then at the others, who were shifting uncomfortably in their seats, and passed the toothpicks, the paprika and the soup tureen.
"Not that! The salt! The salt!"
At which, stupid and tactless as I was, instead of crying, my tears gave way to laughter.
"Mistvieh!" Aunt Mia shouted at me, "Schweinehund! Marsch hinaus!"
For days afterwards I wouldn't look anyone in the eye, and resented Aunt Mia more than anything in the world, because she was right. Ever since, mourning and tragedy brings laughter instead of tears. Who knows. Maybe it's some sort of atavism. For all I know, I might be descended from a tribe that weeps when they're happy, and laugh when something ails them. I'm never as merry and high spirited as when I'm low.
Later, Great-grandmother stopped talking altogether. She didn't even say salt. When a shadow fell over her, she let out a short yelp, and someone would move her chair into the sun. By the afternoon she'd progress from the brick-floored
verandah onto the soil in the yard. The soil doesn't respond to tapping. Great-grandmother couldn't tap with her stick any more. This is what killed her, I think, that her power over others had irrevocably gone. What will become of the Czechs now? And the crown? Dad will see to it. He hasn't much time, of course. He leaves in the early morning, and when he comes back home, he's exhausted and sits on the porch, or verandah, he sits in the dark of night alone, just sits there, with no one daring to talk to him, not even Grandfather. Only my mother. He's as lonely as a king weighed down by the pressing problems of the realm, yet for all that he seems to be a king who is a subject, too, and this sort of thing takes the wind out of a king's sails. Then he abruptly springs to his feet, the hens, like so many frightened courtiers, scurry off, his ermine robe sweeps along the cool stone of the porch, and by the time he reaches his bed, he's fast asleep.
At times, he fell asleep even before I did. Which filled me with pride.