I had been thinking about bread for approximately six months.
Not metaphorically. Actual bread — the specific dense, slightly sour rye bread that the bakery on Rákóczi út made in the morning, the kind that was still warm when you bought it and that you could eat plain without anything on it and it was enough, it was simply enough on its own without requiring anything else to be a complete and satisfying thing. I had thought about it in the trenches on the eastern front and I had thought about it on the train home through the wreckage of what had been the Germano-Hungry Empire and I had thought about it walking through Budapest's streets from the station, the city around me both familiar and not, the way places are when you have been away long enough for them to have continued without you and you have continued without them and the reunion requires adjustment on both sides.
I am Máté Varga, twenty-eight years old, from the Józsefváros district of Budapest, and I had been away for three years and I was starving in the specific way that returning soldiers are starving — not the acute starvation of genuine deprivation but the accumulated deficit of three years of army food, which is food in the technical sense of containing calories and in no other meaningful sense, and which produces in a man a hunger that is partly physical and partly the hunger of a person who has been denied things that made life worth living and wants them back immediately.
The bakery on Rákóczi út was still there, which was the first good thing I had seen since the station.
I went in.
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The smell of the place hit me before the door was fully open — yeast and warmth and the specific sweetness of bread that has been baked recently, which is one of the few smells in human experience that bypasses the brain entirely and goes straight to whatever part of a person is most essentially a person, the part that was warm and fed once and has never stopped wanting to be warm and fed again.
There was one loaf left on the shelf behind the counter. One. A single dense dark loaf sitting in the specific isolation of a thing that is the last of its kind on a given day. It looked exactly as I had imagined it for six months, which is to say it looked like bread, which was enough.
The clerk behind the counter was a middle-aged man with the expression of someone who had been explaining the same thing to many different people for a considerable period of time and had developed, in the course of those explanations, a patience that was almost indistinguishable from resignation.
"How much," I said.
He told me.
I looked at him. I looked at the number he had said, which I was processing against the money I had in my pocket, which was the money the army had given me when it discharged me, which had seemed, when they handed it over, like a reasonable amount of money.
"How much," I said again, in case I had misheard.
He told me again. The same number. Said with the specific patience of a man who has told the number to many people and has watched many people respond the way I was responding and has run out of surprise at the response.
I checked my pocket. I did the arithmetic that the arithmetic required, which was simple and which came out the same way twice. I did not have enough money for the bread. I did not, I realised as I continued the arithmetic, have enough money for anything in the shop. I did not, extending the arithmetic further in a direction I had not intended to go this morning, have enough money for very much at all.
"How," I said, and then I said the word that came after how, which is not a word I will write down but which the clerk had clearly heard from many previous customers in the same position and received without offense, "did this happen."
The clerk looked at me with the expression that had become his permanent expression, the patient resignation of a man who has been at the centre of a thing he did not create and cannot change and must explain repeatedly to people who are discovering it for the first time.
"Inflation," he said.
I looked at the bread. The bread sat on the shelf behind him, warm and dense and exactly as I had imagined it, and I could not buy it, and the clerk watched me not be able to buy it with the tired sympathy of a man who had watched this specific situation resolve itself the same way many times.
I left the shop.
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The streets of Budapest were familiar in their layout and different in their texture. The same streets, the same buildings, but something in the quality of the people moving through them had changed — a particular thinness to the crowds, not in numbers but in the way people moved and held themselves, the specific economy of motion of people who are managing limited resources carefully and have been doing so for long enough that the managing has become their natural state.
Signs in windows that I didn't immediately understand. Queues outside buildings I didn't recognise as places that would generate queues. The occasional sound of argument from somewhere nearby, the kind of argument that has run out of the resources argument requires — energy, patience, the belief that the argument might be resolved — and has become simply the expression of a condition that cannot be argued out of.
I had been away for three years and the city had continued without me in a direction I had not been present to observe developing.
I walked home.
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The door to the apartment on Üllői út was unlocked, which was the first thing I noticed, and then I opened it and the second thing I noticed was that the apartment was empty.
Not empty in the sense of no one home. Empty in the sense of nothing. No furniture. No curtains. No rugs. The specific emptiness of a space that has been stripped rather than simply vacated — the marks on the walls where pictures had hung, the pale rectangles on the floor where rugs had been, the hooks on the walls with nothing hanging from them, the kitchen with its bare shelves and the specific hollow echo that rooms have when they contain nothing soft to absorb the sound.
My wife. My daughter, who had been two years old when I left and was now five and would not remember me as anything except the photograph her mother had presumably kept, assuming her mother had kept anything.
I walked through the rooms. There were three of them and I walked through each one and the walking did not produce anything different from the first room's assessment, which was that there was nothing here that had been here when I left, including the people who had made it worth coming back to.
I sat on the floor of the main room because there was nothing to sit on, and I sat there for a while with the particular quality of a man who has run out of what to do next, which is a quality I had not experienced since the western front but which the western front had at least given me a familiarity with, the familiarity of a man who knows that sitting on the floor of an empty room is not a permanent condition even when it feels like one.
The room was very quiet.
I sat in it.
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The following days had the texture of difficulty that doesn't announce itself dramatically but accumulates. I had a place to sleep, which was the floor of the empty apartment, which was cold and hard but was mine in the sense that no one had yet appeared to inform me it wasn't. I had no food, which I addressed by the slow expenditure of the money that remained after the bread shop's education, buying the cheapest things available in quantities that extended the money as far as arithmetic permitted, which was not far.
The job search was its own kind of education.
I had skills. I had been a machinist before the war, working in one of Budapest's engineering workshops, and I had skills that three years of maintaining military equipment had extended and deepened. I understood machines in the specific way that men understand things they have worked with daily for years, the understanding that lives in the hands rather than the head, and I went to the workshops and the factories of Budapest with this understanding and offered it.
The men who ran the workshops and factories of Budapest were operating their own arithmetic and it was producing the same results as mine. How, I was told in various ways by various people with various degrees of apology, could they afford to employ anyone when they could not afford to pay anyone? The money they would pay me would be worth less when I received it than it had been when they offered it, and less again when I tried to spend it, and the arithmetic of that situation produced a conclusion that was bad for me and also bad for them and also apparently unavoidable in the current circumstances of the currency of a country that had lost a war and been assigned a debt that the currency was in the process of expressing its opinion about.
I walked the streets of Budapest and I looked for work and I did not find it, and the city around me continued its own extended expression of the same arithmetic in various forms — the queues, the thin crowds, the argument sounds from nearby, the shop windows with their numbers that meant different things on different days.
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On the fifth day I heard the speech.
It was coming from a square near the Keleti station, which I was passing on the route I had taken to reach one of the engineering workshops that had produced another variation of the apology for not being able to employ me. A crowd had gathered around a man standing on something that gave him height — a cart or a box, I could not see clearly from the edge of the crowd — and the man was talking in the specific register of someone who has things to say and has located an audience for them and is using both the register and the audience to maximum effect.
I stopped at the edge of the crowd and listened, because stopping at the edge of a crowd to listen costs nothing and I had been calculating the cost of everything for five days.
The man was talking about the peace terms, which was not unusual — everyone in Budapest was talking about the peace terms, in the way that people talk about a catastrophe that is both too large to fully comprehend and too immediate to look away from. But he was talking about them in a specific way, a way that had a direction to it rather than simply being the expression of a condition.
The Germano-Hungry Empire was gone, he said, which everyone knew. But what had replaced it in Hungary's portion of the former empire was a Hungary that had been stripped of its lands — Transylvania gone, territories in the north gone, lands in the south gone, the country cut down from what it had been to something considerably smaller and surrounded by new nations that had been given what Hungary had lost. This was the peace. This was what the German side of the empire's decisions had cost the Hungarian side of the empire — losses that Hungary had not chosen and could not have prevented and was now required to live inside of.
The Communist movement, he said, offered something that the various other movements currently arguing over what Hungary was going to do about its situation did not offer, which was a clear position on the question of the lost lands and a clear plan for what to do about them. The new Hungary needed an army. The new Hungary needed men who had learned to fight, who had spent three years learning to fight for someone else's empire and were now available to fight for their own country's recovery. The Soviet Republic of Hungary was forming, would need soldiers, would pay soldiers — not in the inflating currency of a destroyed empire but in something more stable, in food, in housing, in the specific certainties that the current situation lacked.
I stood at the edge of the crowd and listened to this and did the arithmetic that it required.
I had no job. I had no family waiting for me. I had an empty apartment with a cold floor and a currency that meant less each day and skills that nobody could currently afford to pay for. I had three years of knowing how to fight for an empire that no longer existed, which was a skill that had no civilian application and one specific military application, which was what the man on the cart was describing.
I thought about the bread I could not buy.
I thought about the empty apartment and the pale rectangles on the floor where the rugs had been.
I thought about what three years had purchased, which was a city that had continued without me and a currency that was expressing its opinion about the peace terms and a debt that the arithmetic said would take generations to resolve, and what it had cost, which I knew in the specific way that men know costs they have paid personally.
The man on the cart was still talking. The crowd around him was the specific mix of crowds at this kind of gathering — men who were already persuaded and had come to confirm it, men who were persuadable and were in the process of being persuaded, and men who were at the edge listening because listening cost nothing and they were calculating the cost of everything.
I was in the third category. I was doing the calculation.
The calculation was not coming out in favour of the empty apartment and the cold floor and the arithmetic of the currency that meant less each day.
I stayed at the edge of the crowd. I kept listening.
The man on the cart talked about the lost lands. About Transylvania. About what had been taken and what could be reclaimed. About what Hungary owed itself.
I thought about the bread.
I stepped forward into the crowd.