Marion Merrick’s books are the only first-hand account written by a westerner of what it was like to live and work in communist Hungary, and then in the aftermath of the 1989 change of regime.
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 2 – The disappearing cat; the appearing garage
Some days later Paul and I were taking the children round the corner to the small ice-cream parlour we patronised regularly in the summer. We were deep in conversation about the garage when suddenly Paul halted, exclaiming in a hoarse whisper, ‘Look! There! It’s Gulliver!’
Sitting next to the wheel of a parked car was a large tabby cat observing us as keenly as we were him. Without hesitation I said, ‘You take the children to the ice-cream shop and I’ll take Gulliver home, then I’ll come and meet you there.’
The cat offered not the slightest objection to being picked up and carried home. His basket was still in place in Paul’s study, so after supplying him with food and drink, I placed him in it and left to join the others.
‘Is it really Gulliver?’ asked John, as I sat with them in the small garden of the ice-cream parlour. Surprisingly, the possibility that it might not be him had not even occurred to me.
‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ I replied with more certainty than I suddenly felt. On our return John stated categorically that this was not Gulliver, he remembered that his left hind paw was white – John never failed to notice and recall such details. I looked askance at Paul.
‘Back?’ he asked.
‘Back,’ I grimaced.
Paul picked up the bemused animal, none the worse for his experience and his free lunch, and returned him to the pool of sunshine by the wheel of the parked car from whence he had been abducted.
*
Nick arrived for Easter, but was impatient to travel down to Baja.
‘I’m going to have to buy the house in Tom’s name,’ he informed me. ‘Apparently foreigners still can’t own property in Hungary. How did you manage it?’ he asked, necessitating the umpteenth narration of our good fortune in this respect. I noticed that Nick’s naturally lean looks were now verging on the gaunt.
‘Don’t you think Nick’s lost weight?’ I asked Paul later that evening.
‘I don’t suppose he’s eating properly, and you know what he’s like, drinks too much beer, drinks too much coffee, he smokes, late nights, irregular meals.’
He returned a week later, the proud owner of his first ever home, with more photographs and a variety of excited plans regarding the house’s renovation and his own eventual move to Dunafalva.
‘I’m coming back in the summer,’ he announced as we ate dinner that night. ‘So I’ll see you all then.’
‘We’ll be going to England in July,’ said Paul. ‘But I’m sure we’ll see you either here or there. We’re bound to be in London to see Danielle.’
Nick left two days later. Paul helped him down to the taxi with his luggage while I stood on the balcony with the children and waved him off. As we watched the taxi pull away I noticed that our garden gates were wide open, and that several workmen were walking about carrying papers and tools. At the same moment I saw Mrs. Zombori come hurrying out of her garden next door, waving her arms and saying something I could not hear.
‘You stay here!’ I said to the children, sensing that some crisis was about to erupt. ‘Daddy will be up in a moment. I’m just going down to see what’s going on in the garden.’
I met Paul on his way up the stairs. ‘Something’s happening in the garden,’ I explained hurriedly. ‘You go up to the children, I’ll find out what’s going on.’
Outside, Mrs. Zombori was standing with her arms firmly clasped around the trunk of a tree close to our garage while a group of workmen, together with a large moustached person I took to be their foreman, stood about helplessly.
‘Where’s the building permit?’ I heard Mrs. Zombori ask. ‘I haven’t been notified that building permission has been given. You’re not cutting down this tree until you show it to me!’
The moustached man paced up and down, agitatedly waving a sheaf of papers, but was unable to produce the document that would have satisfied Mrs. Zombori. At this point Ákos appeared and looked angrily first at me and then at Mrs. Zombori.
‘Please move away from the tree,’ he said with as much civility as he could muster.
‘Not until I see your planning permission,’ Mrs. Zombori insisted.
‘We’ll have it in a day or two,’ Ákos retorted, ‘What’s the difference if we start work now?’
But Mrs. Zombori was not to be persuaded, and after some whispered conversation between Ákos and the foreman the men piled back into their car and Ákos stalked back towards the house. Mrs. Zombori remained by the tree, unconvinced that this was not a mere ruse to get her to leave, though she ceased to clasp its trunk quite so firmly.
‘As soon as that car drew up and those men got out I knew what was going on,’ she said to me. ‘Yes, they may really have managed to get building permission one way or the other, but if we let them start now they’ll build the garage permit or no permit.’
‘I suppose they’ll be back in a few days,’ I said. ‘But I still don’t understand it – they won’t be able to get their car into such a small space, so why go to all this bother?’
‘Maybe they’re thinking of moving. They’ll be able to get a far higher price for their flat if they can say they’ve got a garage.’
At that moment the garden gates opened again as Mrs. Katona returned in her old Skoda from the market with her shopping. No sooner had Mrs. Zombori started to narrate the morning’s dramatic events to her, than Ágota crept around the corner of the house to join us.
‘I was watching from the bathroom window,’ she said in a near whisper, looking guiltily around her. ‘They want to build the garage, don’t they?’
‘Yes, but they haven’t got planning permission,’ croaked Mrs. Katona, lighting a cigarette and coughing.
‘But we can’t do anything,’ said Ágota. ‘Not with people like that,’ she said, glancing up at the windows of Ákos’s flat. ‘It’s not like in the old days. These young people have got money. They can do what they like, the law’s got no teeth, and anyway you can always bribe someone.’
The conversation continued until Mrs. Katona finished her cigarette and Mrs. Zombori felt satisfied she could leave the tree and that the men would not be returning.
I walked back upstairs with Mrs. Katona. ‘Of course they’ll be back,’ she said, pausing for breath at the top of the first floor. ‘Ágota’s right – if you’ve got the money you can do anything, though my husband says it’s not possible to earn those amounts legally. And Mrs. Kis told me that they’re exchanging the Audi for a Mercedes – and that’s even bigger! But Mrs. Zombori will stop them if they don’t have that permit. She’s had more difficult things than this to contend with in the years she’s lived in that house.’
Sure enough, a few days later, the car arrived again, though this time it was unobserved by anyone except Ágota, who later admitted to having witnessed from her bathroom window the cutting down of the tree, the digging of the foundations and the laying of cement.
I found her standing by the newly laid cement together with Mrs. Zombori who had returned from shopping to discover the fait accompli. I had come home from teaching and when she saw me Ágota helplessly shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘You see, there’s nothing we can do. I suppose we just have to accept it.’
Fury welled up inside me, a very rare and powerful pumping of adrenalin through my body. I walked back to the house and descended the stairs to the cellar. There, among long-dead spiders in forgotten pots of geraniums, rusty garden rakes and a flat football, I found what I was looking for – the spades with which we shovelled the winter snows. Then, re-emerging with one into the May sunshine, I pulled off my jacket and handed it to Mrs. Zombori, and set to work.
Ágota scurried back inside as I began digging, but Mrs. Zombori waited the full forty minutes while I dug three large craters in the foundations, and randomly slapped down wet, grey cowpats of cement next to them; sweat trickled down my back, and my arms ached at the unaccustomed physical strain.
Mrs. Zombori smiled. ‘Well, I know they’ll just start all over again tomorrow, but at least we’ve done something,’ she said. ‘If I were younger I’d have done the same.’ And I knew she would.
This post was originally published on here
