The Book of Fathers (33 page)

In Pécs he found employment in the Straub shoe shop in Király Street, where leather and boot-making equipment was also sold wholesale to the shoe-and boot-makers of the town. He rented a monthly room in Apácza Street from an elderly couple, whither his sixth sense led him. In front of the window of that house blossomed delicate lilacs, visible from far away. Sándor Csillag was seized by the desire to wake up every morning in a room like this, with lilacs at the window, which as he rose and opened the window wide would fill with their deep scent. He had already shaken on it with the old folks when it dawned on him that the lilac dons its wonderful robes only for a few weeks every year and at other times it is but a sadly stunted dry bush. Still, he had no reason to regret his decision. It was delightful to stroll along Apácza Street, whither the crackling smell of the nearby coffee-roasters and cafés was invariably borne by the wind. Above him the sun traced a diagonal path, soaking in timeless filtered colors the walls painted a daisy yellow.

The Straub shoe store was the town’s most recent to be established, but it was already giving the competition headaches. Old Miksa Straub was given preferential treatment not just by the tradesmen but especially the shopping
public, because he gave sensible advice to those he thought fit, and also offered his wares on credit. To parents seeking footwear for their offspring he honestly explained which shoes were the most hard-wearing, even if they might be a little less comfortable than some others. To older women he was able to point out unerringly if a pair of shoes was likely to give rise to corns on their feet. Any shoes that failed to please he was glad to exchange even months after purchase, declaring: “Here the buyer is God!” then he would clap his palm over his mouth and look up apologetically towards the ceiling. Though born a Jew, after his marriage to Elsa Ráchel Rommwalter the two of them converted to Christianity. He summed up his reasons thus: “When in Rome, speak Italian!”

Everyone loved Old Miksa Straub: his tall, balding head and white whiskers were recognizable even in thick fog and were honored with a doffed hat. When Sándor Csillag first entered the shoe shop, making the bell above the door’s glass window jingle, Old Miksa Straub was just looking through the local paper. Hearing the bell, he put it down at once and clicked his heels unassumingly. “Top of the morning to you, young man. What service can I be to you?”

“I am looking for work.”

“Well, now. And where were you sprung from?”

“I have come from Baja, where I worked for Spolarich and Lindner, ladies’ gowns, frocks, and mantles. Before that I worked in other clothing businesses, but I have had my fill of the rag trade and I would rather like to sell shoes.”

“How right you are! She might be wearing a dirty raincoat, but if the shoes on her feet light up the lady, that makes her elegant at once.”

“And I love their smell,” Sándor Csillag added.

“Well then, off you go round the back, you can sniff around to your heart’s content. My Elsa will tell you what’s where.”

Sándor Csillag’s enthusiasm for stacking the firm’s gray boxes on the shelves was, according to Aunt Elsa’s instructions,
unflagging. Once Aunt Elsa had been a shrunken little woman, but since the shoe shop was doing well she had swelled up into something like a small commode, and on the dressing-gown she wore as an overall the decorations reminded one of porcelain drawer-knobs. She took Sándor under her wing the moment she saw him. “That lad’s a hard worker!” she reported to her husband that night in bed. Old Miksa Straub gave a little hmm. “To me he said he’d buy us out in time.”

“Lad’s got ambition and no mistake.”

They laughed.

Sándor Csillag was serious. When he came of age, he gained access to all the riches that Hami had preserved for him. He traveled up to Homonna to have a word with the executor. Taking all of his inheritance into account, he came to the conclusion that he had enough assets to give up work forever. He ordered the house to be sold, giving the furniture to Hami as a present. Both Books of Fathers he took in his hand luggage and read on the way. There was no space left even in the second volume: Mendel Berda-Stern’s astrological diagrams, calculations, and notes had filled up the pages and left no margin.

As soon as the opportunity presented itself, he seriously inquired of his employer: “Uncle Miksa, how much would you sell your shoe shop for, all in?”

“In cash?”

“Not beans, that’s for sure!”

Uncle Miksa Straub smoked half a pipe of tobacco before replying. He gave a figure which he did not dream of getting.

“Done! Let’s shake on it!”

“You are having me on, sonny Jim! Where would you get your hands on that sort of money?”

“Leave that to me! Well? Shake on it?” And as the old man stared at him blankly, he added: “Hurry up with your
answer or I’ll think better of it and open up a rival shop diagonally across Király Street!”

“Elsa, you hear this? Wonders will never cease!”

The deal was completed that summer. Sándor Csillag had the whole shop renovated. He had gas lamps fitted to the two wrought-iron chandeliers at the entrance; they were the wonder of the street for the evening strollers.

“Not such a big deal,” said Sándor Csillag. “In Budapest the best streets have had electric light since 1873. You have to keep up with the times.”

On the new shop sign it said: Straub & Csillag, since he thought dropping the well-established name would have damaged the firm’s reputation. He offered the Straubs the chance to continue to manage the shop for a fee that was so high they could not refuse. Soon the attention of mothers with marriageable girls was also attracted to the ambitious young man, who was regarded as a good match. He, however, spent little time in Pécs, despite having also purchased the house in Apácza Street. The rumor was that he was busy wooing some aristocratic lady in his home town, which they took to be Homonna; some spoke of a baroness, others of the daughter of a count.

Sándor Csillag took every opportunity to visit the capital. He maintained a permanent suite at the Queen of England Hotel. Nightfall generally found him in houses with red lights. His generosity was suspended in the case of the ladies of the night, whom he paid only as much as he absolutely had to. He was rough with them.

“This one scratches and pinches, like a scorpion,” one of them complained to the madam.

“You would die if that were true,” she replied. A romance set in South America was doing the rounds in that house.

In the mornings Sándor Csillag would sit in the Hotel Bristol, staring at the Danube and the bridge arching over the gray waters, over which carts trundled on their way to
Buda. It was the month of November; snow fell in a soft drizzle. He ordered yet another Viennese coffee. He shook his head when the blue-uniformed young waiter brought the plate in his left hand, grasping the handle of the jug in his right. “Just one hand,” he ticked him off strictly.

He was reading the Books of Fathers for the umpteenth time. It was time to start writing his own section. From Gorove and Partner’s stationery shop he ordered an album in a large format, which even came with a tiny little lock. As soon as he bought it, he carried it with him, for a while wherever he went. He kept the key in the watch fob of his waistcoat. He spent days caressing the pristine white pages with deep satisfaction. There is something sublime in the fact that they are all blank, he thought. He kept putting off the day when he would disturb their blankness and was himself surprised when he asked for pen and ink at the Bristol.

Let the third one begin. I wish Sándor Csillag and his descendants that only joyful matters should grace these pages
.

PRAYER

If only I had enough strength not to squander my abilities on lowly enjoyments. These shake my whole being, yet the greater the ecstasy, the emptier I become. I must conquer my mortal passions, otherwise they will conquer me. My task: to kill the miserable, inferior being within me, so that, being purified, my spirit might guide me to the world of rationality
.

My clan possesses the exceptional gift of memory, a privilege that belongs to the first-born; sometimes even the gates of the future open before us. But whither have we got by means of this? Our fate has been no easier, our life has not been better; we have not managed to spare either ourselves or our loved ones from an evil fate. It is wiser to concentrate all our strength on today, for yesterday has gone and perhaps even the future is foreordained. As Horace says: carpe diem
.

As long as the Straubs were spared the assaults of gout, the travels of Sándor Csillag had little effect on the trade of the Straub & Csillag shoe shop. But later they had little strength to spare for the supervision of the newly recruited employees. These were not as loyal to their masters as the former owners; their sticky palms and nonchalance had a cumulatively damaging influence. Sándor Csillag could observe this whenever he ran his eye over the books, yet he showed little concern. The cost of my way of life is amply covered by the shop. Why should others be denied their share? he thought.

In the life of the nation Gyula Szapáry had now been replaced by Sándor Wekerle as prime minister and it was preparing to celebrate the millennium, a thousand years since the first Magyars arrived in their homeland. The face of Budapest was being made up like those of girls at their coming-out ball. There was a lively debate in the newspapers about the construction of a viaduct for the tram to run on the Pest side of the Danube. The majority thought that such a long viaduct would disfigure the corso, the prime venue for the citizens’ strolls. Yet without a viaduct, the tracks would have to be laid along the quayside, which was prone to annual flooding. Sándor Csillag backed the viaduct. “One must keep up with the times!” He adored every form of transport.

New Year’s Day 1896 found him staying the night in Pest, the carillon of bells that rang out in honor of the millennium long reverberating in his head. A few days later he traveled to Venice. He took the tram to the Western Station and boarded the fast train to Trieste; this left at eight in the evening and arrived in Venice at two-thirty in the morning. At night, after the bed had been made up for him, he stood for a long time in the corridor, smoking a cigar and staring out at the landscape shrouded in darkness. He had a flash-forward of a sudden: in a hundred years’ time, people would
travel on this train just as today, though—oddly—the journey would take only an hour less than it does today, even though it will be powered by an electric engine that belches neither smoke nor soot. Is that credible? An electric engine? Where from? How? Ach … stuff and nonsense.

Despite his best efforts and resolutions, in Venice, too, the hectic in his blood drove him to women of easy virtue. Not only to the downmarket type hovering around the Rialto, but to the courtesans, who here held court on a small island, whither the gondoliers would carry you for a hefty extra fee. Sándor Csillag penned ever-new pledges and oaths and vows in The Book of Fathers about self-restraint, a pure and spiritual life, and a sedulous life. And when he failed to honor these, he added remorseful, repentant lines to his text.

He had a sudden craving for complete peace and solitariness: from the
albergo
near the Accademia he moved to the Lido. This summer resort was almost entirely deserted in January; only one hotel was open and even that had only half-a-dozen occupied rooms. As he found out in the dining room, most of the guests had come for a salt cure, recommended for weak lungs by some doctors.

Sándor Csillag forgot that he had come here in order to be alone the moment he heard the sound of Hungarian being spoken in the room. Bowing as he clicked his heels—something he had learned from old Miksa Straub—he presented himself at the table of his compatriots. The Goldbaum family—father, mother, and two young girls—burst out in vibrant laughter in four different pitches when they learned that the person bowing before them was none other than the second element of the Pécs firm of Straub & Csillag.

“We have been buying our footwear from you for years,” said Helene Goldbaum, the mother.

“Come over and join us!” urged Manfred Goldbaum, the head of the family. “How long have you been in these parts?”

As they partook enthusiastically of coffee à l’italienne, in the course of the rambling conversation it transpired that the Goldbaum family lived in Beremend, half an hour’s ride from Pécs. Manfred Goldbaum had begun as a trouser cutter and taken over as owner of a clothing firm employing fourteen qualified tailors and cutters, working for him on foot-treadle sewing machines imported from Germany. The daughters, Antonia and Ilona, were of marriageable age with—and at these words Manfred Goldbaum gave a knowing wink—substantial dowries. Sándor Csillag’s mouth drew itself into a smile.

Perhaps it was divine inspiration that these two beauties should cross my path. We spend much of our time as a threesome. I would happily marry either of these girls, but preferably both of them … what an impossible notion! Our trio grows daily more carefree and melds more and more into one. But the tension keeps growing. I wonder if I can be honest with them both? I fear that if I reveal my true feelings it would spoil everything. Therefore, I must somehow cut the Gordian knot myself. For this decision there remain but three days, until their departure
.

Antonia was twenty-one, muscular in the manner of a young dog, black as coal, introspective, willful. Ilona was twenty, gentle like the chestnut trees, brown as a fawn and as easily startled. It would be difficult to imagine two sisters less like each other. Ilona was like her mother. And a little like her father. Antonia most resembled, perhaps, Hami. This made the choice both easier and harder.

On the afternoon of their last day, Sándor Csillag asked for the hand of Ilona Goldbaum in marriage. The couple heard him out with faces impassive. Then Manfred Goldbaum said: “You may certainly have Ilona’s hand. But first we must marry off Antonia. As soon as there is a ring on her finger, you may have our little Ilona!”