Alexander Lenard

A Day in the Invisible House

Extracts

 

...

I have a missing photograph of Mussolini to thank for my life and an American publisher's tie-pin to thank for my estate.
In times of chaos we fail to recognise the significance of certain events. At the start of the War armies and navies marched and sailed into action. But it is the four or five physicists, scribbling formulae in their notebooks, who really changed history. Our universe of clashing cosmic dust clouds and exploding suns embraces neither order nor design. Man, whether the rule or the exception, hangs on the merest of trifles. It even dawned on the Bible's omniscient authors that God's excellent plans for mankind went pear-shaped with regard to the apple conundrum. Could it be that the fate of the world turns on the smallest of things?
The aforementioned photograph of Mussolini went missing from the Royal Hungarian Legation. Or to be more precise, from the Royal Hungarian Legation in Rome. To be even more precise, it was missing from the Legation to the Quirinal. (A photograph of Mussolini was also missing from the Legation to the Vatican, but that was natural-the Legation to the Holy See was suspended in a different reality.)
The Royal Hungarian Legation was housed in a villa. Chaos demands that the villa had once domiciled a house of ill repute belonging to an organisation of repute, the Knights of Malta. The Excellencies now crossed the same threshold, the same notorious villa, as those Cardinals whose names had been barely whispered. Quirks of fortune and the storms of war had delegated the strangest people to represent Hungary.
There was Councillor Nagy, the chief patron of the Maltese Ladies. These Ladies were not the faithful wives of the Knights of Malta. They came from far away. Maybe as far away as the end of Mester utca in one of the poorer areas of Budapest. The Ladies used to spend three months every year in Malta as tourists before coming to Rome for three months to recuperate. There were quite a few of these Maltese Ladies, and the Knights also recruited Austrian dancers. The Ladies, however, did more than spend their three months in Rome recuperating, and this got them into trouble with the Italian police, prompting Councillor Nagy to intervene by issuing a note verbale in order to protect Hungary's good name. The Ladies were naturally most grateful to him.
And then Councillor Sommer-Szász, appointed to the Order of Vitéz, happened to be on the same ship carrying Rear-Admiral Horthy to the Straits of Otranto. At the same time, an Italian light cruiser happened to be searching the horizons. They cautiously fired at one another and both vessels put back for harbour. That was all that happened. The Italian Captain had no idea that he had just shot Quartermaster Sommer, the former resident of Pola, into Vitéz Szász, Councillor in Rome.
I do not know what blind fate had rocketed Colonel Kovács to the rank of military attaché, but it must have been blind indeed. Military Attaché Kovács had firm faith in Mussolini's regime. He did not know that the armour of Italian naval vessels was made of silver-foil, or that their bombers had wooden frames, or that Italian tanks were made of tin. He might have been the only person in Rome to have watched all the military parades without realising that exactly the same twenty tanks kept rolling past Il Duce. Every time the tanks completed a circuit of the Colosseum, the crews were given caps and flags, each of a different colour.
Another member of the Legation staff was Pompeio, a citizen of Rome and Italy by birth. He was originally employed by one of Franz Joseph's foreign ministers. After the property belonging to the Imperial and Royal Legation was divided up, the Hungarians got Pompeio. He subsequently became a telephone operator; by then he could handle Austrian, Hungarian and French on the phone.
There was also a porter at the Legation, but his fate was still to come. It arrived when a squadron of Liberators crossed the skies of Rome. The porter happened to watch their slow, dignified flight overhead in the garden. A single solitary bomb happened to fall. The next day someone visited the Legation, bearing a silver button from the porter's uniform picked up in a neighbouring garden. No other trace of him was found.
There was also an employee called Horváth in the office. Of him I knew nothing...
Who exactly, I wondered, did the Legation and its employees represent? Well, they were listed under 'H' for Hongrie, and they certainly represented Hungary in the strictly diplomatic sphere. But that was not all. From a different point of view they also represented the Hungarian State, Nation and Motherland. Contrary to what one might believe, these terms are not synonymous-far from it.
The State imposes taxes and sometimes kills its citizens. The State's political form changes, though it always proclaims itself eternal. Many people make their living out of the State, but nobody loves the State. We may be proud of the Nation, we may fervently work for the Nation, and we may even give to the Nation. But we are happy to die for the Motherland, because she holds us in her bosom and she sustains us. If the Motherland calls, then rise to your feet...
No one would suggest that the above mentioned gentlemen actually represented the Nation. (His Excellency himself floated so high above the others in his top hat, that he could not be seen at all.) In fact, the Legation represented the State on three hundred and sixty-three days of the year.
Anyone sitting in the waiting room was expecting the voice of the State to call out. While waiting, one could acquaint oneself with the duties, powers and apparatus of the State. Beautiful, coloured 17th- and 18th-century engravings hung on the walls of the waiting room and staircase. One showed the city of Esztergom, with impaled people and a condemned man kissing the cross prior to his execution in the foreground. Another depicted the city of Győr, complete with a hanging on the left and a beheading on the right.
Whenever they opened the door of the office, one could hear the State's voice shouting:
"You must bring in your grandparents' certificates of baptism."
"What are you doing in a foreign country?"
"You need to prove beyond doubt that your father was not a Freemason."
"You are not Hungarian, you just speak Hungarian."
"Shut up or I'll hand you over to the Italian police!"
However, on the other two days of the year, March 15, the anniversary of the 1848 revolution, and on Hungary's national day, August 20, the Legation would put its stamps in a drawer, fly the Hungarian flag and open its doors wide. On these days the Legation became the Motherland. On these days, the Motherland welcomed her hungry, dispossessed sons with love and sandwiches. From the walls of the large hall, painted Austrian Archdukes smiled down at the gathering. The Archdukes were not able to exchange their Austrian red and white ribbons for the Hungarian tricolour on these occasions.
In 1919 the new Austrian Republic surrendered Pompeio as well as its princes, archdukes and white-uniformed aristocrats bearing the Order of the Golden Fleece. When Mussolini marched into their old palace, the homeless paintings marched over to the Realm of the Holy Crown of Hungary. These Habsburgs, even if not beribboned with the red, white and green, were welcomed gladly nonetheless.
Her blue-blooded kinsfolk on the walls would no doubt have agreed with the Archduchess in Ferenc Molnár's play, Olympia, when she said "I have nothing in common with the common," had they seen the greed of the mob rushing the sandwich-laden table.
A war was on and people were hungry. Refugees and immigrants lived in a misery unknown to the locals, not even those in prison. On the days of the State, haggard souls waited with their tin bowls for the Capuchin friars to hand out dishwater. However, on the days of the Motherland, an entirely different reality prevailed: they sipped coffee from Herend china. It was the Motherland who encouraged them:
"Do have some scones."
"Another apricot brandy, perhaps?"
The year was 1942. The councillors were all in black.
A young Someone-or-other was in full Hungarian ceremonial attire.
On a table in the corner of the hall, two photographs were displayed among flowers. One was of His Majesty Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy and Emperor of Abyssinia. The other was of Admiral Miklós Horthy of Nagybánya, the Hero of Otranto. Neither of them had the smile of an Archduke; the same kind of sour dignity adorned the faces of both the Emperor of Abyssinia and the Admiral on horseback.
Mr Horváth was standing by the table when someone asked him:
"Mr Horváth, can you tell me why Mussolini's picture is not displayed?"
"But this is not a circus, Sir! We are at the Royal Hungarian Legation!"
Mr Horváth replied, without batting an eyelid.
I happened to be standing right next to them. I understood that I had found a true man-the kind of person Diogenes, lamp in hand, had looked for in vain in the market.
I had a grave problem with my passport at the time. My passport was invalid, and my case was hopeless. It was none other than Mr Horváth who resolved this problem. It was neither the State, nor the Motherland, nor even the Legation, but Mr Horváth himself. He saved me by issuing a paper which verified, in Dante's tongue, that my passport was being held by the Legation 'for renewal'.
"If the Italians accept this document, everything will be fine. If I'm asked about it, I'll have to say it's a fake. Use it in health!" he said.
The Italians accepted it. I even received bread coupons. The finest fruit borne of Italian humanism was that Italians believed anything that had not emanated from their own Propaganda Ministry.
In the wake of dramatic changes, the kings, princes, and all the extras on the stage of world history, resemble those kings of the stage who scrub off their make-up and eat cheese sandwiches in the pub after the curtain falls. Mussolini's picture was eventually removed from every table and Italy ceased to be a circus. The relics of the Dual Monarchy had disappeared from the Roy. Hun. Legation, while a councillor of more refined taste, on the first day of his arrival, had removed the images of the impaled and the hanged convicts from the Legation walls. Only Pompeio remained, on his throne in the phone-room. Mr Horváth disappeared, too.
Now, in my wooden house, I think of Mr Horváth much as a grateful patient thinks of the doctor who saved his life. In Rome, my papers were very ill. Many people died of sickly paperwork back then, but Mr Horváth's brave operation had cured my illness. What he did was as courageous an act as carrying a paralysed patient out of a burning building.
I do not know what became of Mr Horváth, even whether he is still alive or not. What I do know is that he represented nothing but humanity in that villa standing on those extra-territorial grounds outside the walls of Rome. I will feel gratitude towards Mr Horváth until the day I die.
While the missing photograph of Mussolini - "the lobster-eyed monster" - was the instrument of fate that saved my life, it was Mr Macrae's generous tie-pin I had to thank for my quiet little estate.
Mr Macrae's tie-pin was beautiful. Its four little diamonds and four little pearls glimmered in front of me in the restaurant of the New York club where its owner, the publisher of my Latin Winnie-the-Pooh translation had invited me for breakfast.
("Please do not hesitate to accept my invitation," Mr Macrae had kindly said, "I've made two hundred thousand dollars on your book.")

[...]

Every morning I have to enter the world anew. This world feels strange after a dream which illuminates its depths. Homesickness hurts in the morning, when it wakes up.

Thirst and hunger wake up later, after homesickness.
Hunger is more familiar to me than thirst. Even if it has not haunted me as often as homesickness, it did keep me company for long periods. Hunger used to be a loud companion. I still recognise its true face, even under the friendly guise of appetite. In the half hour before breakfast something still lingers from those of my days that went breakfastless. Thank God ghosts fear the cockerel's crow!
My kitchen is housed in a separate building, if I may call a small wooden shed a building. A wall with a window separates the dining area from the small area where the stove stands. This is the way Italians build their houses. A separate kitchen means extra safety for wooden houses. It is harder for the whole house to burn down.
The separate kitchen also means that different roles in life are played out on different stages. Eating takes place in an entirely different setting than thinking or music. Man can choose freely: he can view eating as real life, and regard work and reading as activities of greater or lesser importance to fill the time between meals. Or he can regard sipping his soup as a necessary evil that allows him to work without the vicious circle of visions of bread whirling round and round before his eyes.
Maybe every countryside has its own spiritus loci. Indios lived here for thousands of years. They were quiet people, whose ancestors must have walked from Siberia and across Alaska towards the end of the Ice Age. After a walk of one or two thousand years they brought the Stone Age down here. The Stone Age here did not finish that long ago. Axe-heads are still lying in the grass, and arrowheads still appear from the ground after only one strike with a hoe. Indios regarded eating and sleeping as the purpose of life. They did not eat in order to be able to work. They worked a little - shaping stone axe-heads to thirty-thousand-year-old designs - so that they could eat.
I accept that I am governed by the spirit of the countryside. I proceed along the brick path through the yard to the kitchen building with the knowledge that the important things happen there. Maybe this would not be the case if, for the past two thousand years, those who lived here had been hermits, not forgiving the body for the needs which call man away from stroking the scrolls left behind by the Fathers of the Church.
My breakfast does not resemble my predecessors' breakfasts, which consisted of chewing raw manioc roots by the light of the rising sun. Neither does my breakfast resemble the breakfasts of the hermit masters, who used a piece of dry bread to entice back their souls that so longed to depart. My breakfast has had a long journey here, just as I have had. My breakfast quenches hunger, thirst and homesickness.
Different worlds are so far apart, that the rifts cannot be breached by words.
One would think that "Péter had breakfast" means the same in Hungary as "Peter had breakfast" does in England. This could not be further from the truth. Péter in Hungary had paprikás bacon, and wheaten bread made with boiled potatoes, caraway seeds and salt. He washed it down with plum brandy. However, Peter in England had a cup of tea, a bowl of porridge, fried eggs, and he also finished the life on dry land of some smoked sea fish. So even breakfasts are impossible to compare.
Whoever has lived away from his native land for a long time (yet another guise taken on by state, homeland or nation) will have learnt that eating is not something that involves only hunger, thirst or work; it also involves homesickness.
Providing experimental evidence for this is not a simple affair.
At home with a bowl of pea soup with little egg dumplings one only senses whether it has enough salt or not, whether the peas are ready or should have been cooked for another ten minutes. All you feel after your meal is that you are not as hungry as you were before.
However, near the southern shores of the Atlantic, it feels different. After having not seen peas for ten years, because the natives do not know of peas and because I did not have a garden, I finally acquired some land. I wrote letter after letter, until I received two handfuls of sowing peas from five or ten thousand kilometres away. I planted them, watched the clouds for rain to water the peas, checked at night for guzzling crickets lest they might steal my seedlings, watched whether the pea flowers would be as white as the wings of the butterflies back home. And then one day, one very fine day, I had two handfuls of peas! These will not only make soup, but, out of the steam, a long lost world will swirl. My homesickness will be assuaged between the first and last spoonfuls. My wanderer's anxiety will lessen - the wanderer who knows, even in his sleep, that whatever direction he takes, he will never arrive home.
Only in pea soup or in a Schubert quintet is he ever at home...

...

After the war I was doctor to the Hungarian Academy of Rome for a time. Of all my jobs, this is the one I am proudest of. It cost me a great deal of money, but it was still worth it.
This is how it happened. The director of the Academy, a great scholar of humanism, telephoned me to come and see him and declared:
"I will appoint you as the doctor of the Academy. Your monthly honorarium will be five thousand lira. Is that all right?"
It is difficult to have an argument about numbers with people who are not mathematicians. If I place the money on the eternal scales, it could not have been more than eight dollars as I write now. Too much for a dinner, too little for a month. The Director noticed my anxiety.
"I know five thousand is not very much. But it will be enough for what you'll have to do here, which is absolutely nothing in the world. Your office is merely symbolic. You can have a life like that of Prince Lancelotti, who takes the Pope's Golden Rose to chaste Catholic queens. He is not overstretched. Everybody who comes here is in perfect health after their medical examination. This is what you will have to do- come in once a month and have a little chat with me in Latin, for a laugh. Then you can take your money and go shopping nearby on Campo de' Fiori."
"Five thousand is quite enough for doing nothing!" I accepted the job.
It was enough for trams, but not enough for a taxi when I received one of the numerous urgent calls, mostly at night. Almost every guest introduced himself upon arrival, in the firm conviction that they would end up buried on the Campo Varano.
After a little practice, my long-distance diagnoses always proved correct. When the porter rang me to say "the honourable artist is about to die" or "the honourable writer is still alive, but the monsignore is with him", I just asked a couple of questions.
"Did he arrive yesterday?"
"Yes."
"Did he go to the beach or did he have pizza?"
From the answer I could tell whether the honourable artist had sun-stroke or cholera-like symptoms. I packed my bag and rushed. None of Hungary's great sons died at the Academy.
People coming from Budapest were dazzled by Rome. The city had been liberated in '44. The English and the Americans had brought money, food, light and hope. The Italians, having survived fascism-the saddest circus in history- were now happily dancing, drinking and enjoying their freedom. Foreigners went for a pizza on their first evening after arriving. They had hot, cheesy, oily pizza with fish and mushroom toppings, washed down with Frascati and oranges afterwards. They felt so good that they went somewhere else for a pastasciutta swimming in tomato sauce. At midnight they went back to the Academy. At two in the morning they called for a priest, a doctor and a notary to make their wills.
On summer days they first made tracks for the sea, the great symbol of freedom. Our outstanding Hungarian classicists threw themselves into the briney waves reciting Homer in Greek. At night, in Hungarian, with faces the colour of lobsters, burnt skin peeling in shreds, heads infernally throbbing, they cursed the fate that had driven them to Rome.
"To be born in Keszthely and to die in Rome!" groaned one.
The next day, however, you could manage a conversation with these artists just back from the banks of the Lethe.
It was not only the newcomers who honoured me with their calls. In the Palazzo Falconieri the floors were of stone, the windows did not close properly and the palazzo did not have any heating. Our poets staying there went hoarse, the arthritic legs of the pianists iced up and could not find the pedals. The telephone rang, I had to hurry. Flying, by tram or on foot, it did not matter. It was a question of the gods on the Hungarian Olympus. It was an expensive occupation. I do not know from where I got the money to pay for it. Now, many years later, I can proudly say that my patients' writings make up a considerably large library. They also painted beautiful pictures. It is with great respect that I lay my syringe before them.
Happy is the doctor whose patients are immortal!

Translated by Krisztina Pheby