The Fourth Estate Read online

  “Good morning, Mr. Farkas,” said Lubji, raising his wide-rimmed black hat.

  “Good morning, Mr. Hoch,” he replied. Until that moment Lubji had never thought of himself as Mr. Hoch. After all, he had only recently celebrated his seventeenth birthday.

  “Do you wish to speak to me?” asked Lubji.

  “Yes, Mr. Hoch, I do,” he said, and walked up to his side. He began to shift uneasily from foot to foot. Lubji recalled Mr. Lekski’s advice: “Whenever a customer looks nervous, say nothing.”

  “I was thinking of offering you a job in one of my shops,” said Mr. Farkas, looking up at him.

  For the first time Lubji realized Mr. Farkas had more than one shop. “In what capacity?” he asked.

  “Assistant manager.”

  “And my salary?” When Lubji heard the amount he made no comment, although a hundred pengös a week was almost double what Mr. Cerani was paying him.

  “And where would I live?”

  “There is a room above the premises,” said Mr. Farkas, “which I suspect is far larger than the little attic you presently occupy at the top of the Ceranis’ house.”

  Lubji looked down at him. “I’ll consider your offer, Mr. Farkas,” he said, and once again raised his hat. By the time he had arrived back at the house, he had decided to report the entire conversation to Mr. Cerani before someone else did.

  The old man touched his thick moustache and sighed when Lubji came to the end of his tale. But he did not respond.

  “I made it clear, of course, that I was not interested in working for him,” said Lubji, waiting to see how his boss would react. Mr. Cerani still said nothing, and did not refer to the subject again until they had all sat down for supper the following evening. Lubji smiled when he learned that he would be getting a rise at the end of the week. But on Friday he was disappointed when he opened his little brown envelope and discovered how small the increase turned out to be.

  When Mr. Farkas approached him again the following Saturday and asked if he had made up his mind yet, Lubji simply replied that he was satisfied with the remuneration he was presently receiving. He bowed low before walking away, hoping he had left the impression that he was still open to a counter-offer.

  As he went about his work over the next few weeks, Lubji occasionally glanced up at the large room over the paper shop on the other side of the road. At night as he lay in bed, he tried to envisage what it might be like inside.

  * * *

  After he had been working for the Ceranis for six months, Lubji had managed to save almost all his wages. His only real outlay had been on a secondhand double-breasted suit, two shirts and a spotted tie which had recently replaced his academic garb. But despite his newfound security, he was becoming more and more fearful about where Hitler would attack next. After the Führer had invaded Poland, he had continued to make speeches assuring the Hungarian people that he considered them his allies. But judging by his past record, “ally” was not a word he had looked up in the Polish dictionary.

  Lubji tried not to think about having to move on again, but as each day passed he was made painfully aware of people pointing out that he was Jewish, and he couldn’t help noticing that some of the local inhabitants seemed to be preparing to welcome the Nazis.

  One morning when he was walking to work, a passer-by hissed at Lubji. He was taken by surprise, but within days this became a regular occurrence. Then the first stones were thrown at Mr. Ceranis shop window, and some of the regular customers began to cross the road to transfer their custom to Mr. Farkas. But Mr. Cerani continued to insist that Hitler had categorically stated he would never infringe the territorial integrity of Hungary.

  Lubji reminded his boss that those were the exact words the Führer had used before he invaded Poland. He went on to tell him about a British gentleman called Chamberlain, who had handed in his resignation as prime minister only a few months before.

  Lubji knew that he hadn’t yet saved enough money to cross another border, so the following Monday, long before the Ceranis came down for breakfast, he walked boldly across the road and into his rival’s shop. Mr. Farkas couldn’t hide his surprise when he saw Lubji come through the door.

  “Is your offer of assistant manager still open?” Lubji asked immediately, not wanting to be caught on the wrong side of the road.

  “Not for a Jewboy it isn’t,” replied Mr. Farkas, looking straight at him. “However good you think you are. In any case, as soon as Hitler invades I’ll be taking over your shop.”

  Lubji left without another word. When Mr. Cerani came into the shop an hour later, he told him that Mr. Farkas had made him yet another offer, “But I told him I couldn’t be bought.” Mr. Cerani nodded but said nothing. Lubji was not surprised to find, when he opened his pay packet on Friday, that it contained another small rise.

  Lubji continued to save almost all his earnings. When Jews started being arrested for minor offenses, he began to consider an escape route. Each night after the Ceranis had retired to bed, Lubji would creep downstairs and study the old atlas in Mr. Ceranis little study. He went over the alternatives several times. He would have to avoid crossing into Yugoslavia: surely it would be only a matter of time before it suffered the same fate as Poland and Czechoslovakia. Italy was out of the question, as was Russia. He finally settled on Turkey. Although he had no official papers, he decided that he would go to the railway station at the end of the week and see if he could somehow get on a train making the journey through Romania and Bulgaria to Istanbul. Just after midnight, Lubji closed the old maps of Europe for the last time and returned to his tiny room at the top of the house.

  He knew the time was fast approaching when he would have to tell Mr. Cerani of his plans, but decided to put it off until he had received his pay packet on the following Friday. He climbed into bed and fell asleep, trying to imagine what life would be like in Istanbul. Did they have a market, and were the Turks a race who enjoyed bargaining?

  He was woken from a deep sleep by a loud banging. He leapt out of bed and ran to the little window that overlooked the street. The road was full of soldiers carrying rifles. Some were banging on doors with the butts of their rifles. It would be only moments before they reached the Ceranis’ house. Lubji quickly threw on yesterday’s clothes, removed the wad of money from under his mattress and tucked it into his waist, tightening the wide leather belt that held up his trousers.

  He ran downstairs to the first landing, and disappeared into the bathroom that he shared with the Ceranis. He grabbed the old man’s razor, and quickly cut off the long black ringlets that hung down to his shoulders. He dropped the severed locks into the lavatory and flushed them away. Then he opened the small medicine cabinet and removed Mr. Cerani’s hair cream, plastering a handful on his head in the hope that it would disguise the fact that his hair had been so recently cropped.

  Lubji stared at himself in the mirror and prayed that in his light gray double-breasted suit with its wide lapels, white shirt and spotted blue tie, the invaders just might believe he was nothing more than a Hungarian businessman visiting the capital. At least he could now speak the language without any trace of an accent. He paused before stepping back out onto the landing. As he moved noiselessly down the stairs, he could hear someone already banging on the door of the next house. He quickly checked in the front room, but there was no sign of the Ceranis. He moved on to the kitchen, where he found the old couple hiding under the table, clinging on to each other. While the seven candles of David stood in the corner of the room, there wasn’t going to be an easy way of concealing the fact that they were Jewish.

  Without saying a word, Lubji tiptoed over to the kitchen window, which looked out onto the backyard. He eased it up cautiously and stuck his head out. There was no sign of any soldiers. He turned his gaze to the right and saw a cat scampering up a tree. He looked to the left and stared into the eyes of a soldier. Standing next to him was Mr. Farkas, who nodded and said, “That’s him.”

  Lubji smil