A Lady with a Past

They say that when you enter Budapest, the first thing that accosts you is the peppery assault of goulash on your nostrils as you step out of the airport terminal.

They are lying.

When I arrived in the summer of 1992, it was the nauseous stench of poverty brought on by cold, calculating, and unforgiving political shock.

This was a shattered society. The metro trains clanked and creaked with fatigue; the locals looked lost and bewildered, and the newly-won freedom to vandalise was evident everywhere. On the boarded-up window next to the doorway for Apt. 602, 3 Bartók Béla Street someone had sprayed ‘Kati is a fucking whore’. In English. I rang the bell with trepidation and, when the buzzer sounded to let me in, I wondered what was this world that I was entering into.

I was young back then. And naïve. And with naivety comes idealism. I was a pioneer, a missionary of the new liberal and apostolic age, seeking to convert the heathens to my perfect creed. When an opening at George Soros’ new Central European University came up, I jumped at the opportunity. The curtain had fallen, and it was time to tidy up the mess it had been concealing.

Which is why I found myself standing on the doorstep of Apt. 602, the home of Ms. Csenge Balázs.

The university had given me the contact. Quite how they knew Ms. Balázs I never did find out. So much about her was a mystery and that was but the first enigma that I encountered. When she opened the door, a found myself confronted by a woman of uncertain age yet with obvious elegance and breeding. She was what they call a lady with a past. She had obviously been a beauty in her day, and I found myself mentally erasing half a century of lines and anguish from her to reveal a face that one would fall hopelessly in love with. Yet it was not a warm face nor, I doubted, had it ever been.

She showed me the room. It was excellently situated with a small balcony that commanded a fine view of Liberty Bridge looping its way across the Danube. Such an apartment must have come at great cost – either in money or influence – yet it was clear that Ms. Balázs was in straitened circumstances today. The tablecloths were frayed, and curtains faded, and everything had, like her, an almost melancholy, timeworn air. In my mind she became a symbol for her country: a grand dame fallen into poverty. The price she quoted was pitiful and I accepted immediately.

I soon settled into a pleasant routine of life. My students at the CEU were smart and naïve enough to suck up all I had to teach them on the joys of democracy and capitalism and then regurgitate it in essays that met the grade, so my superiors were happy with me. In the evenings, I would stroll across Liberty Bridge to a little bar that I had found on my second night, and there down a couple of beers, practising my Hungarian with the locals. At the weekends, I would take trips out for mere cents on the juddering trains to Lake Balaton, Pécs, Esztergom and other sites of interest, whilst, every Thursday, as a treat, I would head to the adjacent grand Gellért Baths and lounge languidly in the therapeutic waters. I even found myself a girlfriend, a bright-eyed, quick-witted, and lonely PhD student from Eger, whom I would walk hand-in-hand with along the banks of the river, although I never once invited her back to Ms. Balázs’ apartment, for it somehow did not seem proper.

As the months past, although my conversations with my landlady never extended beyond a curt exchange of pleasantries, I began to piece together fragments of who she was as a person. The first thing I learned was that she was a drinker. On a couple of occasions when she spoke to me about rubbish collection days or the commencement of roadworks outside the building, I thought I could smell the unmistakable odour of pálinka on her breath and then, one day when I was preparing a stew in the kitchen, I flipped open the bin to deposit some peelings in there and found two empty bottles of the stuff. After that I checked regularly and, sure enough, a fresh bottle appeared in there every couple of days. She never seemed worse for the habit however, and I guessed that she was what is referred to as a functioning alcoholic.

My second lesson came when one day about three months in when I needed an envelope to send a letter home. I opened one of the drawers in the kitchen and came across a photograph lying in there. It had not been in the drawer previously – for a regularly delved in there as Ms. Balázs had given me permission to do so – and I suspect that she had been looking at it the previous evening, for there was a fresh bottle of pálinka in the bin and I had heard her sitting in there listening to the radio the previous evening. I took it out and examined it. It was in black and white and showed a quartet of people: two men and two women. They were dressed in outfits of the 1940s or 50s and the two girls were exceptionally pretty. I scrutinised it closer and realised that the girl on the left was her. My hunch had been correct! She had been a great beauty and, judging by the outfits – the two gentlemen were in dinner jackets and the girls in ballgowns – wealthy too. But who were the three others and where were they? The background seemed to be a castle somewhere; the sort one finds by the Danube where the nobles of the Hapsburg Era used to reside. I wondered just who she was but then heard the door unlocking as she returned from the shops laden with supplies, and so stuffed the photograph back into the drawer and retreated to my room.

When I checked again later, it had gone.

Ms. Csenge Balázs had no visitors which is why, when there was a ring on the doorbell one evening in early December, I was so surprised. She was out, shopping I think, so I answered it and found myself face-to-face with a man in his seventies dressed in a shabby grey suit and wearing a brown trilby. “Is Miss Balázs in?” he asked in Hungarian, looking rather surprised to see me. ‘So, she is a Miss and not a Mrs,’ I thought to myself.

“She will be back soon. Would you like to come in and have some coffee while you wait?”

He accepted my request and entered, laying the trilby down on the kitchen table as he sat. I told him my name, my profession, and my status in the dwelling as the lodger. He told me that his name was Karol Czartoryski and he gave his status as ‘retired’. As he spoke, I realised, with a shiver of glee, that he was one of the men in the photograph.

We had just finished our coffees when she arrived, and I left them alone together.

It was in mid-January, after I had returned from my break at home, two weeks of opening presents under the tree, singing carols and catching up with family in West Virginia, that the next incident in the Csenge Balázs enigma occurred. I was returning from the university, having walked over Liberty Bridge, my hands sunk deep into my coat pockets due to the cold, when I came across a commotion in front of the doorway to 3 Bartók Béla Street. My landlady was there, her shopping spilling from the bags on the floor all around her, whilst a man in his forties was haranguing her loudly in Hungarian and prodding her with his finger. Whatever the argument was about, my sense of right was enflamed: to accost an elderly lady like that in public was simply wrong, so I rushed up to them, positioned myself between them and ordered him, in his native tongue, to back off. He told me to stay out of other people’s business, and I retorted that ill manners and violence against women are everyone’s business. He told me to fuck right off, and I replied that he do the same. Then, realising that I was both younger and stronger than him, and that a crowd was gathering, he slunk off into the night like the cur he was. Another victory for American intervention.

Then, picking up the groceries, I helped Miss Balázs into the building and summoned the creaking lift.

“Are you alright?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied, looking anything but.

“Are you sure?”

“Thank you for your help, Mr. Pyle.”

“What he did was wrong, accosting you in public like that.”

“He believes he had good reason.”

The lift arrived.

When we got to the apartment, I placed the groceries on the table. “Who was he?” I asked.

“It is a long story,” she replied, looking visibly shaken.

“I have time.”

“I do not,” she retorted coldly, before retreating to her chambers.

It was the following evening when it happened.

I had decided to treat myself and, after work, had strolled over to the Rudas Baths where I had lain in Ottoman luxury for a couple of hours, the warm waters easing the chill in my bones caused by the bitter January cold. Walking back into the apartment warmed and rejuvenated, I was surprised to find Miss Balázs seated at the kitchen table, a bottle of pálinka before her and a looked of tired, bleary and tormented bemusement upon her face.

For the first and last time ever, I saw her drunk.

“Sit!” she said. It was a command rather than a request, from a voice that was used to issuing commands. I seated myself and she poured me a generous glass.

“Thank you,” I replied.

“I will speak to you in English,” she pronounced. “You try with Magyar, but it is not up to standard.”

I blushed with shame. I so wanted to be able to speak the language of my forebears with fluency, but it is so very difficult.

“It matters not,” she said, waving her hand. “English, German, French, Russian; I can speak them all.”

I nodded and took a sip of the pálinka.

“Drink like a man, not a mouse!” she commanded. “In my day, men could drink, not like you Americans. In my day, people had substance!”

I drank and winced. She downed her glass in one and then poured two more out.

“That man,” she said. “That man that you saved me from. He is the son of someone that I knew. I wasn’t going to tell you, but then I thought that I should. Someone should know. He believes that I wronged his father. I did wrong his father, but the bastard deserved it. He does not know that.”

I nodded and let her continue.

“I was not born to this!” she exclaimed, waving her hand about the meagre apartment. “I was born in a chateau in the east of the country. It is an orphanage now. My family is an old one, one of the greatest in all of Hungary. Or at least, we were until those godless bastards took everything.”

“The communists?”

She nodded. “Evil to the core. The day their tyranny fell I danced with joy. They killed my father and brothers. Arrested them in the night and they never returned. I was left all alone, I had to fend for myself.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I survived,” she replied without any emotion. There was a pause as she refilled her glass. “And then, I took my revenge.”

“The father of the man in the street?”

She nodded. “So, now you know,” she pronounced, and it was clear that the conversation was over.

Three days later, after returning from the shops, I found a man on the doorstep. How he had got into the building, I do not know, but he was hammering on the door of Apt. 602. “May I help you?” he asked.

“I am looking for Miss Csenge Balázs,” he replied.

“This is her home, but it is clear that she is not in. I am her lodger. May I pass her a message?”

He handed me a card. “Tell her to get in touch with me!” he said, before turning on his heels and departing. I looked at the card. B. Kadar – Jogász. A lawyer. I opened the door with the key and entered inside. She was seated at the kitchen table looking worried. “Has he gone?” she asked.

I nodded. “He asked me to give you this.” She took the card, glanced at it and then threw it in the bin. Nothing more was said.

In the weeks that followed, I encountered Jogász Kadar several times. “She is avoiding me,” he said on the third occasion. “But she cannot do so forever. Tell her this will be escalated.” I passed the message on and she shrugged.

On the fifth day I found a policeman there. I let him in as I did not want to obstruct the law, but, thankfully, that day Miss Balázs truly was out. When I told her later, she blanched.

Exiting the Gellért Baths the following evening, I saw a crowd gathered on Liberty Bridge. Instinctively, I knew, but I went over anyway. “What happened?” I asked.

“A woman,” said a bystander. “She threw herself off.”

“Is she dead?” I asked.

“No one can survive long in those waters, not in January,” she replied. I looked down at the churning, frothing maelstrom, a world away from the placid Blue Danube of waltzes and knew that I would never see Miss Csenge Balázs again.

Only two people attended the funeral aside from the priest. The third was the man in the grey suit and trilby. I invited him back to the apartment afterwards and, to my surprise, he accepted. I made him a coffee and offered him the last of her pálinka. He accepted the former and refused the latter. I then took out the photograph that I had found in her bedside drawer and gave it to him. He cradled it in his hands, smiled and then wiped away a tear. “It is you, isn’t it?” I asked.

He nodded. “She was beautiful back then, so very beautiful.”

“She still was when she died.”

“That is true, but back then! You should have seen her! At the great balls they held in Andrássy Castle. All the finest of Hungarian society were there, even Horthy and Ferenc Szálasi. But when she descended down the staircase in her black velvet gown, everyone else was forgotten. No man could resist her charms.”

“You were from the same social set?”

“We were affianced.”

Affianced! Yet she never married. Why?

“Those other two: that is her brother, Gyula and my sister, Zsófia. They married that summer, the finest wedding in all of Hungary. For a year they were very happy and then the Soviets came. He was shot, she perished in prison. So too Csenge’s parents and my own. I got off with a ten-year sentence.”

“And Miss Balázs?”

“She met Zoltán Gerő, Political Commissar in the Communist Party. As I said, no man was able to resist her charms. Not even a Red.”

“But they did not marry.”

“How could they? She was politically tainted, whilst he was married already to some frump from his home village whom he had already bored of, but who possessed solid proletarian credentials. So, he set her up in this apartment and spent his weekday evenings with her, whilst returning to play the dutiful husband at the weekends.”

Hence the apartment in the prime location.

“And so, it continued for eleven years. When I got out of gaol, she would not see me. Said that it would compromise her. She belonged to someone else now.”

“Did she love him?”

“Could Csenge ever love? Perhaps before all the murders, perhaps then she could, but afterwards? No. She tolerated but never loved.”

“And then?”

“And then came fifty-six and the tanks rolled into Budapest. He was now a wanted man and so he hid here. She, however, went to the hardliners. Gerő was one of those who had arrested her father. She never forgot that. The price of revealing him was a rise in political standing for herself and keeping the apartment. They dragged him out kicking and screaming.”

“His son. He was here. He accosted her in the street, and I sent him packing.”

“The democratic government opened the secret police archives. His betrayer was revealed. And the other crimes she had a hand in. She worked for them for years after that, a honey trap. They laid off her whilst she emmeshed them in her web. The list of men she killed is long.”

“Yet still you visited her.”

“She was my only link with that world before. I knew her before; I could see the ounce of humanity that was left and I clung to it, unreasonably perhaps, but I clung all the same. It didn’t stop her killing herself though.”

“No. What caused that?”

“This apartment. The original owners were demanding it back and the law had decided on their behalf. After all, who wants to reward a murderer. She was to be evicted tomorrow.”

“She never said anything.”

“Throughout her whole life she never said anything.”

We finished our coffees in silence, and he left. The next day I moved into a hotel before finding a place near to my girlfriend’s, although that relationship did not last the summer.

Written 04-06/04/2021, Smallthorne, UK

Copyright © 2021, Matthew E. Pointon