Now You See It, Now You Don’t and House of Cards have been included as part of the Open Society Archive dedicated to this period in the CEU. You can read a serialisation of them here on Xpatloop. You can also buy the dual-volume book on Kindle as well as in Stanfords London.
 

Book Two, Chapter 4
Part 4 – New Year; changing times

Our thirteen-year-old Golf had been standing in the garage in its post-accident state. We now had the money to have the repairs done, though in the intervening months our registration plate had expired.

Cars like ours, brought in from abroad, required no tax to be paid, but were given a temporary number plate which needed to be renewed annually – for a fee. The repairs done, Paul set off to the vehicle licensing centre in an industrial wasteland outside the city. He returned late in the afternoon.

‘They told me we can’t have a new plate,’ he said. ‘They said we should never have been given one in the first place.’

‘But they gave it to us!’ I said.

‘Yes, and now they say it’s against the regulations.’

I sighed. ‘So now what?’

‘I don’t know really, I don’t think they’ve decided what to do yet.’

Two weeks later a brown envelope brought their decision. A short letter informed us that we should now import the car ‘legally’, thus incurring import tax of some 120,000 forints, whereupon we would receive our new number plate. A yellow pay-in slip was enclosed.

‘They must be mad!’ I exclaimed. ‘The car’s only worth about seventy thousand!’

We tore up the letter and cheque and decided that we had no alternative but to abandon the car to its protracted hibernation in the cold garage.

Days soon became shorter, while the snow covering the ankle-deep conker leaves bore witness to the comings and goings of local cats and children’s toboggans. Every new snowfall muffled the sounds of traffic, and as our sledge glided along the dark, tree-lined streets, I watched the silent transformation of familiar landmarks, the thick flakes falling gold through the dim, amber streetlights.

Christmas was near. Frosty pine trees leant in readiness on balconies or against house walls. The 24^th December itself was clearly bisected at three o’clock in the afternoon: the morning hours saw the frantic activities of cooking, cleaning, bringing in and decorating the tree.

Then, as an early dusk fell and street lamps cast eerie shadows on the snowy paths, a stillness descended over the entire city: all public transport stopped, only an occasional car hurried to reach a family waiting with fish soup and presents. Lights were extinguished, candles lit, and so began once again the most peaceful night of the year.

The few days following Christmas were devoted to visits to other family members not seen on the 24^th, while New Year’s Eve was heralded by wearing masks and blowing gaudy foil trumpets in the streets, and the bang of the occasional firecracker.

Since I had a morbid dislike of New Year’s celebrations, and now had the excuse of two young children to keep me at home, I decided to invite one or two friends over who shared these sentiments. Our English friend Nick was coming to Hungary for the holiday, and we agreed to invite Éva, as she had expressed a similar antipathy regarding the New Year on previous occasions.
 

Nick arrived between Christmas and New Year, eager to travel down to Baja. Nick knew more classical music and more about it than almost anyone we knew. He was also an inveterate computer maniac.

Somehow though, in spite of an enviable intelligence and an affable character, he had drifted in – but mainly out – of jobs most of his life. This had been a major source of conflict between him and Danielle: she taught from morning till evening, only to return home and find Nick lying in the bath at five o’clock, well ensconced in Lohengrin, the day’s – and often the previous night’s – washing-up still undone.

He would then be ready to start the day at seven in the evening, and was still chain-smoking and chain-coffee-drinking at four o’clock the following morning, still reading The Gramophone or some computer magazine, still listening to Wagner or Bartók.

Nick was the perfect companion in days of dolce far niente, but to live with or make any time-related arrangement with, was impossible: his friends vied with one another’s stories of Nick’s late arrivals for a dinner invitation – the worst being two days! He now had some work at City University in London, but was beginning to express thoughts of setting up home in Baja.

The evening passed quietly, only a glancing reference made to the event we had gathered not to celebrate. Éva left before one, we stood on the snowy balcony and waved to her below through the frosty skeleton of the acacia tree, while in the distance sounded the odd firecracker and trumpet blast.

The first morning of a new year: Nick and Paul slept, the children watched a Christmas video and I cleared up. The kitchen bin was full, so I slipped out of the front door and took it downstairs.

The house was silent and my breath hung in frozen clouds about my head. The snow was well-tramped down to the gate, but hung heavily on the bushes and trees. The hoar-covered bins stood in readiness for the following day’s collection at the side of the road; the cold burned my cheeks.

Having thrown my bag into the bin I shivered back to the front door, glancing behind to see if the gate had shut properly behind me. It was then that I caught sight of something as distantly-familiar as it was unexpected: a bearded man of indeterminate age, thinly clad, carrying a shabby rucksack and two carrier bags, who had quietly opened the bin and was beginning to rummage among its contents.

He was either oblivious to or unconcerned by my gaze, closing one bin and opening that next to it. He withdrew a half loaf of bread and some of the previous night’s champagne bottles, and then carefully placed them in his rucksack. I continued to watch as he tried the handle of the locked garden gate next door and then turned resignedly from it.

I watched, no longer aware of the cold, as he shuffled on down the empty street, his footprints around the dustbins the only visible affirmation of the scene I had just witnessed, while the bells chimed distantly for the first mass of this New Year.

Early example of homelessness at Keleti station

Click here for earlier extracts

Main photo: The state insurance company / Courtesy Fortepan Sándor Bojár