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 6Part 4 – Further revelations from Mrs ZomboriAs Mrs. Zombori uttered these last words a car bearing the insignia of the local council drew up outside.‘You stay here, I’ll go,’ she said, making for the door. I went out onto the terrace and watched as the uniformed council officials took photographs of the building work in progress and handed Ákos a formal notification of the fine he must pay in consequence. The workmen had half-heartedly downed their tools and were awaiting further instructions. The car then left and Mrs. Zombori came back inside.‘Won’t they just start again?’ I asked, nodding towards the men outside.‘If they do,’ said Mrs. Zombori, ‘I’ll ring up again.’Ten minutes later work was indeed recommenced, and true to her word Mrs. Zombori again telephoned the council offices. In the time it took to make another pot of tea they had returned, more photos were taken and another fine incurred. Mrs. Zombori and I stood smiling with satisfaction from her side of the garden fence – we might not be able bring the work to a halt, but we would make things as difficult as we could.
Ákos glared from the other side of the ivy. ‘I’ll pay these,’ he said, waving the papers that detailed the fines. ‘But I’ll have my garage.’‘They should be taking pictures of you!’ added the foreman. ‘You and your vandalism.’Though we knew we must ultimately concede defeat, we were nevertheless satisfied that Ákos had not had everything his own way. I looked at my watch and realised that Paul must now be home with the children and would not have any idea where I was.‘I think I should go,’ I said to Mrs. Zombori.‘Oh dear, must you?’ she asked. ‘But there are still so many interesting things that happened here.’
Thus we agreed I would ring Paul from her house and hear the rest of the story, in the absence of any pressing need for me to hurry home.‘Now, where had I got to?’ Mrs. Zombori asked me, adding a spoonful of rum to my teacup and settling herself down again.
‘The new family who came when the house was nationalised…’‘Oh yes. Well, things got much worse then. At first we had to share the bathroom and the kitchen with them, just as my aunt and uncle had done earlier. But in 1952 we got permission to build a dividing wall in the house, so at least we had some privacy. This new family consisted of a man who mended shoes, his wife and their son. They were terrible. The man kept reporting us to the authorities – first for having relatives who had been deported from Budapest – of course, that always made someone an object of suspicion; and then he reported us for wasting energy and he later accused us of having a maid.’‘But why did he do that?’‘Because he hoped he could then have us sent away like my aunt and uncle, and that he and his relatives would then have the whole house. In fact we once heard them talking about it to some people who had come to visit them. There was a terrible housing shortage and maybe these were their relations who were hoping to have half of the house.‘Anyway, eventually this couple’s son got married and his wife came to live here, after which they too had a son. So that means there were now five people, three generations, living in the other part of the house: the parents, the young married couple and their son.‘Things were quiet for a few years, though Marika couldn’t get on with them at all. They were always arguing and once they attacked each other in the garden! I can’t remember now what it was all about.‘But that child, the little boy, was a rotten apple. By the time he was eighteen he had been convicted of paedophilia and had to spend five years in prison. You can imagine how worried we were when he was released and came back to live here – our two boys were quite young and we didn’t dare to leave them playing outside in the garden unsupervised. Not long after he was caught again and was put in jail a second time.‘In 1989, at the end of the last régime, he was given his freedom as part of a general amnesty and he came back here wanting money from his grandmother – his parents had disappeared but we had no idea where to. He beat her so badly that she was taken away in an ambulance, and then later she hanged herself, right here in this house.Mrs. Zombori paused as if seeing the terrible scene before her again.‘The old man was still alive, living here alone,’ she went on, ‘but then one day a woman came asking for him, some distant relative of his I seem to remember. It was then that we realised that the blinds on his windows had been down for several days, so when he didn’t answer the doorbell we called the police. They broke the door down, and sure enough, the man had been dead for a number of days. The police said they thought he’d committed suicide too because the flat was quite tidy, and all the family papers were in a neat pile on the table.’ She paused again.‘And what happened then, who lived in the other part of the house after that?’‘Well, I rented out a room through a travel agency to Polish women – I needed the money, my husband had died by then. You probably remember how many Poles used to come here to do their buying and selling?’I thought back to our days in Garay tér and the swathes of people who had congregated in the square selling their personal belongings outside the market gates in order to take home ‘luxury’ items still unavailable in Poland. I nodded.
Garay tér market. Courtesy Fortepan/Sándor Kereki
‘But then I had a visit from the police and it turned out that the women I then had staying were, in fact, prostitutes. I’d had enough by then. As soon as we could arrange it, my son and his wife swapped their flat for the other half of this house, and now they live here with their children. So the house is all back in the family now, though of course as I told you, Marika still lives in the cellar. But we get on all right.’I glanced out of the window. The workmen were packing up to leave.‘It’s been so interesting,’ I said. ‘Have you ever thought of writing it all down?’Mrs. Zombori laughed. ‘Similar things happened to lots of people. But I can imagine how strange it must be to you coming from a country where such events are unheard of.’‘But your children and grandchildren would find it fascinating, surely?’Again she smiled. ‘Not really, no,’ she said shaking her head. ‘It’s never of much interest within the family. But if you’d like to come again I have lots more stories about the war and those times.’I left the villa and let myself in at our garden gate. It was dusk. My mind was still full of the events related to me, so that at first I did not think about the newly re-laid cement of the garage foundations, or whether my aching muscles would bear another frenzied bout of excavation.But then I started as I realised there was a car parked next to the setting concrete, with a driver seated inside reading a newspaper. He glanced up at me as I walked past, and it dawned on me that he was a security guard, a ‘gorilla’ as Hungarians called such muscle-bound bouncers and bodyguards. Ákos must have hired him for the night to preclude any further sabotage to his building project. I chuckled. I would not have had the strength for a repeat performance, but I was glad if I had caused him one more inconvenience.
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