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 6
Part 3 – Mrs Zombori’s story

The following morning I saw the now familiar red Lada draw up outside the gate, and Mrs. Zombori simultaneously emerge from her house onto the terrace. I pulled on my shoes and ran down to the garden. The foreman was standing on the edge of the mess of set concrete, surveying the moonscape which lay before him. He began to curse, gesticulating wildly. On catching sight of me, no doubt smirking unashamedly, he exploded. ‘Are you responsible for this vandalism?’ he yelled.

‘You’re the vandal!’ I countered. ‘You cut down the tree, and look what you’re doing to our garden!’

‘So you admit to this, do you?’

‘Do you admit to cutting the tree down without planning permission?’
 

He came close up to me, and had I been a man I felt sure he would have hit me. Red in the face and clenching his fists, he opened his mouth as though to say something, but instead let out a hiss through his teeth, turned on his heel and stalked off.
 

Mrs. Zombori came and stood beside me. She took my arm, saying, ‘Come inside with me.’ I obediently turned and followed her out of the garden gate, up the few steps to her terrace and into the cool, quiet house. As we entered her living room, whose windows afforded a perfect view of our garden, we saw the foreman, now in the company of Ákos, re-examining my handiwork.

Mrs. Zombori made tea, though I had difficulty in raising the cup to my lips due to the combined effects of acute muscle strain incurred by my digging, and the general trembling occasioned by my recent encounter.

‘I’ll ring the council,’ she said, picking up the telephone directory and leafing through its pages. ‘Let’s see if they’ll come and put a stop to this.’

In England this would have been a perfectly natural reaction to such a situation, but one I had not considered. I, more than the elderly Mrs. Zombori, had seemingly remained in the world of the previous régime where the state was an amorphous, unpredictable and unaccountable group of anonymous bureaucrats who could not be relied on for help in such circumstances.

As she replaced the receiver Mrs. Zombori smiled. ‘They’re sending someone round. I don’t know what they’ll do, but they confirmed that no planning permission has been granted.’ She sighed and sank back into her armchair in the knowledge that she had done what she could and that someone else would now take over.

‘You know, I’ve lived in this house since 1948 – you wouldn’t believe half of all that’s happened here in those years.’

This was obviously an invitation for me to inquire, and Mrs. Katona’s words of a few days before came back to me, that Mrs. Zombori had had many difficulties to contend with.

‘Have you lived here for so long?’ I asked.

‘Yes. This villa belonged to my aunt and uncle,’ she began. ‘My uncle was an architect, he designed many churches, including the one near here in Kassai tér. They didn’t have any children, and since the house is so big the council moved a family in after the war – you had no choice in those days and you never knew who you would get, alcoholics, anyone.

The church designed by Mrs Zombori’s uncle

‘And as well as that family, a woman called Marika was given the cellar flat. She was pregnant, but her husband had been killed on the Russian front during the war. So my aunt and uncle had to share their house with two families of strangers. Of course they had separate rooms, but there was only one kitchen and one bathroom.’

I thought back to our flat on Dózsa György út, and the countless others like it in the city, where to circumvent such enforced co-habitation with strangers, flats had been divided to ensure privacy and independent living areas.

‘Anyway, a few years later the family up here managed to get a flat in town and moved away, and so my husband and I quickly moved in so that at least the main part of the house was all within one family.’

‘And is that Marika I’ve seen coming and going from here who’s always dressed in black?’ I asked, realising that I had never sought to explain the relationship between Mrs. Zombori and a similarly elderly woman I regularly saw working in her garden, and standing at the bus stop every afternoon.

‘Yes, that’s her. She still lives in the cellar. She had a son not long after coming to live here, but he was killed in a motorcycle accident when he was about twenty years old. She’s worn black from that day to this, and that’s why you see her at the bus stop – she goes to the cemetery, to his grave, every day of the year – yes, even on Christmas day,’ she said, as I raised my eyebrows in surprise.

‘But my uncle was very involved in right-wing politics,’ she continued, ‘though he didn’t tell us anything of what he was doing, and to be quite honest I felt it was safer not to know. Then in the 1950s, the authorities began the forced removal of intellectuals and people with right-wing sympathies out of Budapest and into the country.

My uncle suspected he would be moved too, and sure enough, in 1951 they were given just twenty-four hours’ notice that they would have to leave this house. It was terrible – my aunt was sixty-eight and my uncle seventy-three, and my aunt was very ill. All that they were allowed to take with them was what they could carry, no furniture, nothing like that, though somehow they managed to take one mattress.

They had no idea where they would be taken to, either. It happened to lots of people – the order would be given and twenty-four hours later a lorry would arrive, already packed with other people and their belongings, and take you away with them.’

‘Where were your aunt and uncle taken?’
 

‘Right out to the east of Hungary, to the Great Plain. They were put in a small peasant house, but they didn’t live in the house itself. They had to live in what we call the ‘summer kitchen’ attached to the outside of the main building and traditionally used for baking bread and the making of sausages, that sort of thing.

So they lived in that one room, the floor was bare earth, and of course there was no bathroom. They simply had the one mattress that they put on the ground to sleep.’ Mrs. Zombori paused, looking into the distance.

Middle-class Hungarians forcibly moved to the countryside in the 1950s

‘Anyway, the night before my aunt and uncle were taken away, my uncle asked my husband to help him carry his writing desk into our part of the house. We knew that all his personal papers were in it, but of course we agreed to take it of course.

However, the authorities usually came to check that no furniture had been removed and we were very nervous about what kind of incriminating documents could be in the desk, things to do with his affiliation to the Christian Party and the Church. On top of that, his desk was made of very dark wood and all our furniture was new and light, so it was obvious that it had been moved from one of the other rooms.

‘The lorry came for them at dawn the next morning, and after they had gone my husband and I started to go through the desk, looking at the letters and papers, and really we had no alternative but to burn them. We put them in the kályha, the wood-burning stove over there,’ she said, pointing.

‘The problem was though that it was June, no-one had a fire going in thirty degrees! We were worried that the neighbours would be suspicious when they saw smoke coming from our chimney and might report us. We decided to burn everything in the desk. There wasn’t time to read every letter, but unfortunately what we didn’t realise was that among the papers was my uncle’s will in which he stated that I should inherit the house from him.

So we burnt that too! And then one week later the state nationalised the house – you know that they nationalised almost all property – and so we had to pay rent to live here! In fact, history then repeated itself because the house was now considered too large for just the two of us, and so again a family of strangers was sent here, and they didn’t leave until last year.’

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