Sunday Morning! “Katalin Street” by Magda Szabó

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned two things about sin. The first is that, if you commit an offense against another person, it doesn’t matter really whether or not you believe in God, the devil, or the afterlife; you will still carry the emotional scars. Religious people sometimes fantasize that an atheist could “do anything” without the fear of punishment in the afterlife. Believe me, it’s not so.

Secondly, and perhaps more frighteningly, I’ve found that most sins really are sins of omission: more often a matter of failing in our duties to one other than actually doing anything heinous. It’s very unlikely that you’ll ever rob or murder or assault someone. But failing to help someone who maybe you could have? That’s a far easier way to go wrong. Sometimes, you don’t even know that you failed until it’s too late.

And maybe we could add another uncomfortable truth, the one Magda Szabó uses to open and close her novel “Katalin Street”:

(I)n everyone’s life there is only one person whose name can be cried out in the moment of death.

I wrote about Szabó’s novel The Door here not too long ago, which dealt with a writer and her husband who failed to do right by their older housekeeper, a strange and difficult woman who’d come to resemble a sort of Biblical prophet by the end. There was a sense in which Szabó was dealing with Hungary’s history in the novel, but it was largely subordinate to the specificity of her characters. These were complicated people and doing the right thing for them would have been hard for any of us.

So, it was a nice surprise shortly after reading The Door to discover Katalin Street, also recently published by the NYRB Classics imprint, in a Little Free Library across Houston Street from our apartment. My girlfriend usually requests I put these finds in a plastic bag in the freezer for a week, in case of bedbugs. So, after its time in quarantine, I was ready to go.

Katalin Street also deals with the ways that people fail the ones they love under the forces of larger historical forces, but it does so with a much wider scope and keener sense of the Hungarian context of this story. The ghosts of the past are much more literal here as well. As Laura Van Der Berg writes, in the New York Times review of the novel:

In “Katalin Street,” the past is never dormant, never settled. The past is an open wound, a life force busily shaping an increasingly bewildering present.

In fact, nothing is past. The story jumps forward and back in time and focuses on three families on the eponymous street in Prague over the course of 3-4 decades: the Elkes, Temses, and Held families lived near each other during the happiest time in their lives. Their children Bálint Elkes, the Temses’ girls Irén and her “daft” sister Blanka, and Harriette Held grew up together; they even performed little patriotic plays for their parents, written by Mr. Temses, a teacher whose sense of right and wrong comes handed down from his society and nation. As the novel begins, this is the idyll to which they are all trying to return in their own ways: the time before the war. Mr. Held, a Jewish dentist, predicts: “We shall live here until the day we die.” He doesn’t know how right he is.

When the war comes, the families try to avoid dealing with it. The Major’s son Bálint gets engaged to Irén, although all the girls have been infatuated with him at one point or another. On the day of their wedding, word comes that the Held parents have been taken away to be killed. Plans had been made to hide and protect their daughter, Henriette, but foolish mistakes are made with tragic consequences; she is shot by a soldier. None of them are really duplicitous. They did the best they could and they simply failed; this was where all of their lives ruptured and hers ended. I rarely use the term “gut wrenching” to describe fiction, but it certainly applies to this section of the novel.

1960S Budapest street

The other families survive, but no one is ever the same again. By the end of the story, which is also the beginning of the story, it’s 1968 and the Soviets are in power. Henriette wanders the city as a ghost, although sometimes others can see her. Bálint has been fired from his job, but is being brought back for rehabilitation. Blanka, who denounced him and others, is now on the outs with the local authorities. Irén is in a loveless marriage with another man, who she leaves to be with Bálint even though she no longer loves him. Most strikingly, the old neighborhood is being redeveloped and they’ve all been displaced. Like Henriette, they will never return to Katalin Street, but they all still hover outside and haunt it.

Szabó published Katalin Street in 1969, almost twenty years before the Door, and about ten years after being rehabilitated herself, as a former “enemy of the state.” However, the novel doesn’t require much knowledge about Hungarian history; it also captures the more universal way that our memories seem to shrink to two or three key moments by the time we reach middle-age, and how the points in which we failed in our duties are often much harder to bear than the times we did “wrong.” For whatever it’s worth, I really wish I’d done more to help my friend Rob, and just have been kinder to him, before he drank himself to death. But, that’s the thing with living: you hardly know what the hell is going on until it’s over.

And so, what are YOU reading, writing, watching, playing, pondering, or haunting this weekend?