The 1965 Letters

A Selection

 

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Alexander Lenard to Klára Szerb

July 2, 1965

Dear Donna Klári,
It is unnecessary for me to tell you that Journey by Moonlight is a wonderful book, but may I just say it has totally bedazzled me! Did your good husband write this book for me? I daren't believe that he did; he wrote it for the Kerényis too, and also for the Kerényi's neighbour Elisabeth (you have heard of her?) - but he did write it for a very small circle of people who know their way around the Palazzo Falconieri, who have taken the local train to Perugia, who have picked strawberries by Keats' grave, and seen the prison named Regina Coeli-and who all profess that "the practical career is a myth, a humbug invented to cheer themselves up by people who aren't capable of doing anything intellectual".
He wrote it for a select few, but it is my secret conviction that Dante wrote for a select few as well, and it is not his fault that he is read by so many.
No-I do think, in the end, that this book was written specially for me. I lived in Rome for fifteen years, almost twice as long as in Budapest... and I know it INSIDEOUT. It is a wonderful experience to return from the INSIDE to the OUTSIDE... where the Trastevere is still mysterious, the stone-floored rooms still unfamiliar, and the Circolare tram line still wonderful. Mihály from the novel returned to everyday life... he could have remained in Italy, of course. There are ordinary days in Italy too; they are just harder to find. You can't keep "slipping back", you've got to grow old into them-and then it will be hard to see Italy as a stage once again, something not quite serious; it will be almost impossible to see it as a slightly less realistic reality. Your husband saw Italy just long enough for it to remain a stage, where every member of the cast is still largely, or at least half foreign, a stranger. And yet he was there long enough to hear the critically important sentences ("He speaks foreign", "there haven't been any wolves since Mussolini became the Duce around Gubbio") and to find the domains of secrets.
Gubbio, Foligno... you know, there is a black-bearded soothsayer who has lived in Foligno for two hundred years. There is no Italian who will not buy the Barbanera di Foligno almanac on the first of January... (think of the numbers in circulation, Dante, even Pinocchio cannot come close!) If Barbanera says it is going to rain, it is dead certain that it is going to rain somewhere. "Death of a famous man" he wrote for a given day, and Roosevelt died of a stroke. In Foligno you walk about in the streets with the feeling that your future is written in a book, the immortal Barbanera already knows your fate.
And Assisi? I cannot imagine that Magda has not told you about Caldari! The apothecary in his tower who can tell the past and future with his pendulum... who found Apollo's shrine beneath the bishop's palace, with the first and only Greek inscriptions in Umbria, and frescoes depicting (perhaps) coffee-trees. Pythia was intoxicated, made ecstatic by coffee. I took Károly to the magician once; it was Károly who made him famous in Sweden, Elisabeth who made him famous in Germany, and of us all three became corresponding members of the Accademia Properziana del Subasio. They searched for water in Subasio for a thousand years -in vain. Caldari felt there was a spring 56 metres down... that spring quenches and bathes the whole of Assisi today! A country of miracles, a city of miracles!
There is a passage in The Necklace in which someone describes, after the French Revolution, how a couple foresaw it all.
It is a great temptation to play this game here and now-for literature is life too and a personality invented or put together from fragments of live people is no less real than someone made up of pure protein. (Cogitatur, ergo est.)
Time before 1938 passed just as quickly as it did in 1786. A day lasted 24 hours. Cats grew old in ten years, men in 60... Mihály's adventure was no more distant from 1938 than the necklace trial was from Bastille Day. He returned into practical life, into reality. Into that tangible, not dreamlike reality where "Ervin's family was exterminated, the "Ulpius" flat bombed, his factory and Pataki's business ruined. Rome remained... but the dead did not pass gently from the tomb of Cestius down to Orcus, but to the accompaniment of machine-gun fire, and it was there that the German invasion broke in on September 12, 1943. It was there that an uncertain number of youths armed with hand-grenades and muskets from 1891 managed to hold them up for three or four hours. One of the Hungarians-Sándor Kereszty-absent-mindedly loitering and looking on, was shot in the back of the neck at the Fossa Ardeatine along with 350 other "hostages". The weekdays of nine months meant five thousand dead-and here too the zealous death-demons wore black and swastikas. The hetaeras of death did not dance on frescoes. The Regina Coeli was an island of death, too.
The writer and his characters converge into one fate because there really is no difference between creator and creation.
These reminiscences notwithstanding, this is a great novel. (Even if it can only be read in Hungarian and French.) From the German translation will follow English-Danish-perhaps even Italian versions. (I would like to do that one.) And what a film could be made out of it! (If Károly should take on Waldheim's role, for example, senzo trucco.) The translation will be a success. Would you not like to go and see Assisi with Magda Kerényi? To visit Caldari? The pharmacy of secrets, which was founded by a wandering Hungarian after the Rákóczi revolt? Perhaps Elisabeth-not the Elisabeth (Erzsi) of the novel, but the Elisabeth who could so easily be the heroine of any novel-could return for an evening to visit the magus who loves her as Goddesses should be loved by the possessors of smaller secrets.
It is not only poetry that is important; the novel is too, as long as it is dreamlike.
Fond regards,
Sándor

 

Lenard reads Journey by Moonlight as a roman à clef, instantly recognising the people who must have served as inspiration for some of the characters in the novel. With the recollection of the possible fate of each character, he talks about the common trauma of their generation, the Second World War and its aftermath. In a letter (possibly) dated July 27, Klára Szerb herself relates who served as models for the characters in Journey:

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Klára Szerb to Alexander Lenard

September 29, 1965

My Dear Old Cave-bear,
I am going to be wicked today, and tell you about my work in "cemeteryanthropology".
You will have realised instantly that I did not immediately connect this activity and the piecing together of bones in Rome. Calcification of the gyrus (cerebral sclerosis)! But, since I've caught on to yours, you're not going to be left out of mine.
1945 made everyone lose their minds, but I'd already lost mine in 1944. It began with my believing that it was my responsibility to keep my sister-in-law and her son alive and safe until I could hand them over to my mother and her mother, when I did not even know, right to the end, whether they were alive or dead. We'd brought them over from Slovakia to Budapest to save them from the Germans, and they lived through the siege in Pest, while we were in Budafok-from where Rózsika and I sent the postcard-along the main road to Lake Balaton, caught between the two-pronged Russian advance towards Székesfehérvár and Pest, and the German counterattack, with the front line constantly surging to and fro. My sister-in-law, with a close to four-month-old dead foetus in her womb, had lost a great deal of blood, was suffering from septicaemia, and drifted in and out of consciousness. We carried her with us everywhere on a stretcher. There was no medical assistance to be had anywhere, and I cursed our fate, that she had to die barely two hours' distance from Pest, because, in my naivety, I believed that there were still hospitals in Pest where people could go for care. It later turned out that she only survived because she was not in hospital, and because I was out of my mind. I froze water in a plate to use for a compress on her, or melted snow, stole sugar from the pantry of the convent that had taken us in-I think they were Salesians-and used it to make a concentrated solution which I fed to her, drop by drop, whenever her fever abated. And we forced a Hungarian Nazi doctor, at gunpoint, to clean out her gaping womb with his bare hands. And all we had by way of medication was aspirin. Then we were running again, because the Germans had once more reached the village, and the nuns in the convent were all looking forward to handing us over to the Germans-except for the Mother Superior, who will become one of the saints of the twentieth century. Until the order was resettled in Austria, she came to visit me every six months from the borderland. That is how my brother's wedding took place. Imagine the tableau: a narrow cell, the shrieking of the Katyushas around us, the Germans counterattacking, Irina lying in bed, unconscious, a wailing, pee-sodden child in my arms. Bandi, by then also completely out of his mind, was convinced that the world would come to an end if Irina were to die before they were married, so he found a registrar, and literally dragged him into the convent so the child would have a name. The man, quaking in fear-Bandi had brought him at gunpoint also-a red, white and green sash tied around his middle, began rattling off his speech: Dear betrothed, do you... you can imagine. The bride was dying, the child was crying, there was incessant gunfire from the cannons and the planes, but Irina became a lawful wedded wife, sadly without becoming aware of it. All that I've recounted here took place not in the space of ten lines of course, but from Christmas to the end of January.
Then came that sudden speechlessness in April, about which I still cannot bring myself to speak, and the madness of having to bring Tóni home, because I couldn't possibly leave him there, where he had been murdered. The madness grew into a fully-fledged obsession, an extremely impracticable obsession. Balf is a long way-near the Austrian border-and opening up a mass grave meant procuring authorisation, an endless round of bureaucratic things-to-be-done, and the intervention of several administrative organs and institutions. And of course a great deal of money to pay for labour and transport. Naturally, the government consented to Tóni's exhumation-Keresztury was the Minister of Education and Religion at the time-they even gave me some money, but, and here comes the but: the Jewish community dug in their heels, and let it be understood that this was not a personal, private matter, but a public one. About 560 men had been buried there, and I was either to bring them all back, or leave Tóni in the mass grave. In other words, they wanted me to pull out the chestnuts roasted in the fires of hell for them, because everyone expected them to organise the exhumations, but they were too impotent to do it, and they thought that Tóni's person would guarantee the great, demonstrative funeral of the "victims" that they wanted. I accepted this condition as well, and little by little a small consortium came into being, of which I was the merry leader. There was no money; inflation was rife. Everybody who had a piece of precious metal put in their bit, and we soon got to the point where I had collected about 70 per cent of the total, so the expedition could finally set off, with the exhumers, a tractor pulling two wagons with prefabricated boxes, because the railways refused to undertake the conveyance of this kind of passengers. And I also had to contend with the frantic next of kin who all demanded to be present at the exhumation. The "management" of my little firm finally acceded and coerced the others into accepting the decision that relatives should stay put. The reason why I insisted on this was that I knew it would be hard enough just to see it through, once we were there, in Balf, I simply wouldn't have the strength to tend to hysterical relatives as well. I knew where I would find Tóni, because Antal Lukács (de genere Baron Kohner) had been there with him, and though he had not helped him, he had known, as he says, that he had to note down everything about Tóni, "for posterity". He was senseless enough to tell me that he had had a piece of bacon, a bit of this, a bit of that, but he hadn't given Tóni any, because then he wouldn't have had enough to last him until his escape. That rotter with his wolfish grin was almost beaten to death by the others when Tóni died. It was this noble, upright banker's son who drove me there to show me which of the six mass graves Tóni was buried in. Oh yes, I haven't told you this part yet: the relatives-those who survived that is-all gave me distinguishing marks to look for. Some of them had been visited by a survivor from Balf, who told them what to look for, what distinguishing marks or signs they had tied on their son, husband or brother, to help with the identification later on. These marks or signs were mostly empty boxes, bits of tin tied to their necks, arms or legs. Most often the person who made the sign did not survive either, and just as often there was no one left to tell at home. Of those who did survive, some trusted in "teeth" to identify their relatives, others put their faith in hair colour, or the remnants of clothing. (This of course would never have worked, because those who died were immediately stripped of all clothing.) These were the most important variations. I had only four days to do the job, because in the meanwhile at home that miserable community, who would not do a thing until I started threatening them with an interpellation in parliament, had organized a demonstrative funeral with much military pomp and circumstance for Sunday morning. It was not the major who asked me whether I could not "hurry things along" but the Chevra Kadisha (the Jewish burial society) who kept on sending messengers and telegrams. I was raking through remains that had been decomposing for twenty months, and could only "name" and hand over twenty or so with reassuring certainty to relatives who were happy to have this at least. And I do admit to some pia fraus as well. I hope I won't go to hell because of that. I gave sons to two mothers who wanted to get their only sons back, at least to bury. There were plenty to choose from. And then something very strange happened, at the exact moment that I found Tóni. It may sound funny, but at the time it wasn't funny at all: one of my teeth, a good, healthy tooth even today, started to ache. Not like when you have toothache and take a painkiller and it goes away, but constantly, day and night, without respite. It was maddening, and if the possibility of sleep had ever arisen, I still wouldn't have been able to sleep because of it. And the toothache lasted up until the moment we set off for home. Set off, and how! The monster funeral was to be on Sunday morning, Tóni's funeral was to take place two days later, in the Kerepesi Cemetery. He was to be buried in a special grave granted at public expense. And on Saturday morning we found another mass grave-quite by chance-the seventh one. So we dug that up as well, and Saturday night found us still at Balf, still filling and nailing down boxes by the light of pitch-torches. There was one episode to "cheer us up". Mr Roth from Miskolc-he really was Roth; a short, red-haired little Jew- suddenly turned up in Balf, despite all the prohibitions. He believed that his poor little seventeen-year-old only son would be more likely to be found if he was present. We did not find a body that could be identified with any certainty, but he would not move an inch from the grave. I pleaded with him to start for Pest immediately as we could not take him. With the exhumers and myself there were five of us in the driving compartment of the tractor. But Mr Roth refused to move-he had to observe the Sabbath and wait until it was over. He was an Orthodox Jew. By then I'd come to the end of my tether, and started screaming at the poor man-chased him away because I knew that if he did not set off immediately-Sabbath or not-the train would leave, and he would not arrive in time for the ceremony in the Rákoskeresztúr Jewish Cemetery. Mr Roth disappeared. We set off late that night, and on the outskirts of Balf who do we see waving at us to stop the tractor but Mr Roth. Because he was not allowed to travel while the Sabbath was still on, but the train did not know that, and left without him. It was raining, a strong wind was blowing-terrible end-of-October weather-so we stopped. Mr Roth sobbed. "But Madam, I'm only a little Jew, I can sit on someone's lap." We stood there, swearing, then I remembered that there was a huge spare tyre on the tractor roof. We sat Mr Roth in that, covered him with a piece of tarpaulin to keep off the wind and the rain, so he would not catch pneumonia, and set out into the world. The tractor with Mr Roth sitting on the spare tyre, pulling two wagons behind us with the five hundred boxes. It was so unbelievably infernal that today I can hardly believe it really happened. After having checked on him several times along the way to make sure he was still in place, we left Mr Roth in Győr, so he could come up to Pest on the early morning train, while we went into an all-night café to get warm and to have a hot drink. But after five minutes the proprietor came up to us and threw us out; why? Because we stank: we stank so badly that no one could stand to be near us. You can imagine, you know from experience what it's like to take part in an exhumation, especially one lasting several days, day and night. We could never again wear the clothes we were wearing then because of the smell. Then in the morning I handed over my consignment at Rákoskeresztúr, and Tóni at the Kerepesi Cemetery. I went home, had a bath, and went back for the special funeral. But I felt nothing, and it was the same at Tóni's funeral two days later: Sándor Sík, the speeches of the minister, it all failed to move me. You can imagine. It had lasted a year and a half, this story. As I've said before: my coronary spasms have nothing to do with my ancestors. As for my toothache, the one I had in Balf, our psychiatrist friend, the one who analysed Ágnes' writing so "appositely", told me that primitive peoples would knock out their own teeth whenever a death occurred, and according to interpreters of dreams, to dream of toothache signifies death. I hadn't known that at the time, but the tooth that suddenly went mad at Balf, independently of me or not, is still healthy. How did it "know" that it was supposed to behave that way? Was it some kind of witchcraft? One very embarrassing thing remained with me for a long time after this adventure: I could not bear to see dun-coloured, broken, torn things, broken pieces of wood, torn clothing. This aversion was so bad that one time at the Granasztóis' I silently slid off my chair in a faint because someone had brought a broken plank of wood into the room. This was the first and I hope the only time that my body behaved in an undisciplined manner. Perhaps you are right after all, and it is impossible to live in this world! The trouble is, even if I were to hide myself in the jungle, this world would not cease, and that other world, your world, is still a part of this one. Napalm in Peru, in Vietnam, and potentially everywhere. "These times are worse than one thinks," said Goethe indignantly, incensed because instead of mosaics they manufactured costume jewellery in Venice. What would he say today, I wonder? You asked me in your last letter, and this little story of mine has brought it to mind: in Babits' translation, Circle Eight is "Rondabugyrod", you remembered right. Have you a copy? Tell me if you would like one, and I'll send it to you gladly! And I've also wanted to ask you several times: do you own a complete Babits? If you don't, I'll send you that as well. There is no life for you without Babits, I hope we are fully agreed on that. His lines could serve as an epitaph, Life is no good

And in these harsh times, when souls are cheap
and those who cannot bend will break,
There'll be no coffins for all of the dead
For some of the living, no life to live.

Did you get Ágnes' address? I repeat, it is: XII. Királyhágó u. 5/b.
Forgive for this letter. Please look after yourself. I am the professor of grave digging, not you. Your tooth did not ache, and you were not searching for your life.

 

Lenard sent Klára Szerb some of what he had published in the 1950s in the São Paulo Hungarian review Kultúra. Among these pieces was "The Resurrection and Death of Habakuk Brittle". In this he recounts a short period of his life following the Second World War, when, working in his capacity as anthropologist commissioned by the Graves Registration Service of the US army in Naples, he had to prepare for their return home the remains of American soldiers killed in action and exhumed. From a "surplus" cervical vertebra and other "borrowed" fragments of bone, a missing soldier was for a short while "resurrected" then "killed" again. Klára Szerb responded to this piece with two letters, one of which appears here.
Antal Szerb was taken to a labour camp at the beginning of 1944. His company was moved near the Austrian border in November. By then circumstances were truly terrible there. In December 1944 two young army officers, Guido Görgey and Jenő Thassy, tried to have him released using false papers, but Szerb pleaded for the attempt at rescue to include two of his friends, the essayist Gábor Halász and the poet György Sárközi. The attempt failed. Szerb was beaten to death in the camp at Balf on January 27, 1945; his friends died shortly after.

pia fraus... pious fraud

Dezső Keresztury (1904-1996), literary historian, poet, minister of education and religion between 1945-47. A member of Szerb's circle of friends, it was he who delivered the address at Szerb's funeral.

Sándor Sík (1889-1963), poet, translator, member of the Piarist order, the provincial of the order in Hungary from 1948, school teacher, later university professor. He was Antal Szerb's teacher of Hungarian language and literature at the Piarist gimnazium in Budapest. It was he who, at Mrs Antal Szerb's request, conducted Antal Szerb's funeral service at the Kerepesi cemetery.

the Granasztóis... Pál Granasztói (1908-1985), architect and writer, and his wife were friends of Antal and Klára Szerb.

Circle Eight is "Rondabugyrod"...A reference to Circle Eight, "Malebolge", in Dante's Divine Comedy.

And in these harsh times... From Mihály Babits' poem of the same title "E zord időben", in the cycle Magamról II (On Myself II)

Ágnes... Ágnes Nemes-Nagy (1922-1991), poet, essayist. See Note 4 on p. 27.