Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1979. július-december (33. évfolyam, 27-49. szám)
1979-09-20 / 35. szám
Thursday, Sept. 20. 1979. 10 AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZÓ TIBOR DÉRY; There were thirty or forty women standing about on the Pest embankment, in front of the Shell Petroleum depot. Attached to one corner of the concrete depot was a little wooden hut—the guardhouse. From a wooden cage in the tiny window a finch chirruped in the first rays of the rising sun. The women were waiting for.the depot to open. Some had been there since four in the morning, in answer to a small advertisement for seamstresses to sew sacks in the company’s workshop along the embankment. They tied their headscarves tighter and stamped their feet in the chilly dawn, watching the queue behind them grow till it almost reached the steps of Parliament. By seven in the morning there must have been a couple of hundred there, but the hiring still didn’t start. In the tiny window of the hut the guard’s tousled head appeired, and gazed with wondering, sleepy eyes at the great herd of gently murmuring women. “What’ve you come for?” he asked the ones standing under the window. “Jobs? No one from the^ office told me anything about jobs." "Why should they have?” one of the women retorted. "Someone’ll be down from the office, no doubt.” The guard smoothed his moustache. "Well, if they come, they come,” he grumbled. “Just wait then." He ran his sleepy eyes down the queue, to see if there were any pretty girls worth staring at. Then he shut the window. The women waited. Not many were joining the-queue now, in fact some at the very back even gave up the struggle as hopeless after a few minutes, turned round and went home again. The ones who had come when it was still dark, who had by now been standing outside the depot for four or five hours with the cold wind off the Danube twisting at times round their legs like a wet scarf, were more patient. Shifting their weight from one leg to the other, they stamped their feet, rummaged in their coat pockets and chatted quietly to each other with the plaintive lilt of litanies said on the outskirts of town. At the front stood a vast, placid woman who towered two heads above the rest. The slight little old woman beside her barely came up to her breasts. They had come together from the far end of Angyalföld, Mrs Rózsa pausing every five steps to let old Aunt Piroska catch up. The pair, urged on by the silent whip of their cares, had been first to arrive at their prospective place of work, well before the crack of dawn. "Well, the sun's up and about,’ remarked Aunt Piroska, who but a few years ago had come to Pfest from the vineyards of the Révfülöp Hills “It’ll be warmer by and by,” she added encouragingly with a warm hearted smile. “Warmer?” echoed Mrs Rózsa, who had not spoken a word for the last two hours. Her blonde hair was cropped short, a thick, navy-blue, man’s sweater clung to her enormous bust. The small grey eyes above her prominent cheekbones followed so slowly the motion of someone or something that one felt she needed time to decide which way to propel them. Her speech was slow too, especially the initial few hesitant words, that groped, as it were, for the direction the sentence should take, but when her slow gaze did finally rest upon someone, when she had taken stock of them and aimed at them a ponderous flow of words like a second, weightier gaze, when she had bent her mighty trunk towards the person with surprising speed, at that point—thrice accosted with mounting force by her gaze, her voice and her whole body—few could evade her, and most stood dumbfounded, as if face to face with a bull. “Get warmer, will it?” she echoed. “What good heart you’re in. Aunt Piroska!” “If it wasn’t for this cold wind,” another woman said. Aunt Piroska laughed. "Lots of people wonder what the wind's for,” she said in her clear, girlish, resonant voice. “It’s what cleans the air. If it wasn't for the wind, people’d turn smelly.” "They’re smelly anyway!” Mrs Rózsa hammered with her fist on the wall of the hut, but no answer came. The guard had gone out. Meanwhile a policeman had shown up. He was listening, with his solemn moustache, to the women’s complaints, while periodically casting gentler, less official glances at the younger ones. “Patience, women, patience," he said."We’ll all grow old in good time." The long queue was beginning to attract onlookers. A few idly whistling youngsters leaned over the iron rails of the promenade above the embankment. Over their heads a. German nursemaid tugged at the coat of her charge as he aimed his spittle at the heads of the women beneath. An occasional old gentleman paused on his morning stroll to ask the policeman what the women were waiting for. The queue was now so long, as it stretched and wound back through the morning mist, that from one end it seemed to disappear with a quiet hum into the pink clouds up in the heavens. By this time the sun was strong and warmed the ragged band of descended angels stranded on the embankment. In the meantime the warehouse guard had returned, as well. "Go and phone the office,” a woman told him. "How much longer do We have to wait here?" “And who’ll pay me my 20 fillers back for the call?” was the guard’s sulky retort. “You just wait patiently and someone’s bound to come. What sort of work are you after?" "We’re going to sew sacks.” “Sew sacks?” queried the guard in amazement. "We don’t need sacks.” “Why not?” "Of course you need them, mister,” said a young lad standing beside him, “Haven’t y6u heard about the new regulation? Petrol’s got to be sold in sacks!” Aunt Piroska laughed. “Like flour is!” "Right,” said the lad. “It’s less of a fire, hazard when it’s sold in sacks, because it doesn’t spill as easily as when it’s in a can.” “Bless my soul, what a brain you’ve got,” cried Aunt Piroska, ana rubbed her numb hands. "Come here and let me pull your ears!” "Shall 1 bring a ladder too, ma'am?" The woman laughed. “What for?" “So you don't have to stand on tiptoe, ma’am,” said the boy politely. The policeman, returning from his beat, stopped again at the head of the queue. “Who ordered you to come here?" he asked those at the front. "There was an ad in the paper." "What paper?” The policeman studied for some time the paper held out to him, and moving his moustache up and down returned it. The guard, who had been reading over his shoulder, tilted his cap back on his head. “Go home, you women,” he said loudly. "It seems you’ve been taken for a ride. I see from the paper it’s April 1st." A few of the women began to laugh. A ripple of laughter spread back down the queue, taking two or three minutes to reach the end by the Parliament steps, be released from the ponderous bodies of the angels and dissolve in the sun. “Go on with you, you old rascal,” said one girl to the guard. Now that it was perceptibly warmer the woman complained with a better temper. Aunt Piroska found a crust of bread deep down in her pocket and set her old gums working upon it with such relish that w reaths of red sausages appeared in the air and like haloes began lightly and appetizingly to circle over the heads of the*women. The whole surface of the Danube now lay docile and sparkling in the sun. It was soon so warm that three bargemen on a barge tied to the bank took off their shirts and sat down to play cards with bared, tattooed chests. A tiny white scrap of a dog on the next barge began to bark gaily, as if he too had caught a whiff of the sausage wreath that circled, with a growing semblance of reality, above the head of Aunt Piroska. "My son,” said one woman, “is a butcher’s boy, but he’s been out of work for a year. Yesterday he went down to the slaughterhouse and sold his apron for 40 fillérs.” The crowd of spectators had in the meantime grown so large that the iron railings of the promenade were filled like the balcony of a theatre, while curious onlookers, among them several little nursemaids pushing prams, had spilled out onto the embankment to stand right next to the stage itself. “Do go home,” called a young peasant girl whose heart went out to the waiting women. “Can’t you see they’ve had a laugh on you?” “No one’d be as heartless as that,” replied a woman in the queue. "Of course they wouldn’t”, called a voice from the audience. "You just keep waiting, till midnight at the earliest!” “Why only till midnight?” added a lad. “It's not right to pass up a good chance of a job!” “You haven’t got the wrong address, have you?” tried someone else. They laughed. "Ma’am, how much is a sack of petrol?" "What's the rate they’re paying?” someone asked. “Don’t accept too little!” “Go home!" “Lord save us!” the lad protested. “For God’s sake don’t go home!” "What a beating you'll get at home, mum," grinned a boy who looked like an apprentice, "if you go back without a job! What a beating you’ll get!” The women didn’t reply much; quite a few turned their backs on the busybodies and whispered among themselves, or stared at their shoes with the awkward smiles of ones who have no idea what is happening. Some, here and there, beside themselves with rage, answered back occasionally with cheeks flushed red, but soon they too fell silent, and the two hundred women grew steadily more silent. By now it was almost noon, and a number of those at the very back had slunk away, their stomachs rumbling from hunger; even a few of those from the middle of the queue had left for home. But apart from these few all stayed in their places, each clinging desperately to the little ray of hope inspired by the perseverance of the others. Staying seemed no more pointless than going home. None could contemplate the thought that someone after they had left might come out and take on those who had stayed behind. But still, when they heard the churcn bells chime midday from Batthyány Square on the opposite bank, several women, either cursing, grumbling and moaning, or wordless in sullen rage, upped and went away. “Go and ring the office!” cried a number of others to the guard who Jtood uneasily by his hut. “And pay for it out of my own pocket?” “The office’ll pay you back!” "Like hell they will! Collect it among yourselves!” "So we have to pay money and all?" cried a girl bitterly. Mrs. Rózsa reached* into her pocket and handed over her last 20 fillérs. The guard noticed her great arms trembling as she put the money into his hand. He looked up at her face, but it was motionless as marble. A quarter of an hour later, when he returned with the policeman—not daring to face the excited women alone—and when he told them Shell had no need of women to sew sacks, such a storm of wailing and cursing rose up that even the policeman thought it wise to call the station for reinforcements. He feared he might be unable to control the women on his own. The sky clouded over, a sudden cold gust blew off the river, the bargemen pu. on their shirts and belligerently stepped ashore. "Wouldn’t surprise me," said one of the crowd, “if they tore the depot to pieces!” “Why? What’s it got to do with the company?” asked a clerk. "Nothing.” “Well then?” "Well then...” echoed the other doubtfully. People eyed one another somewhat suspiciously. It seemed likely that whoever had placed the advertisement in the paper would be standing here quietly to watch the results. It could be anyone in the crowd, and since he would clearly take care not to give himself away, everyone was suspect, everyone eyed his neighbout warily, and for fear of seeming suspicious joined in the cries of outrage. But the storm that was approaching left little for the police to do. There were soon only thirty or forty women, the .indomitable core of the scattered host, in front of the depot. “Let’s go home, Mrs Rózsa," said Aunt Piroska, wiping the tears from her eyes. "I haven’t had such a good laugh for years. How I love the person that thought it up.” Mrs Rózsa did not answer. She stepped over to a nearby pile of bricks, grabbed two in her right hand as easily as if they had been pebbles and hurled them at the guard’s hut. The wooden walls creaked, the window smashed. “That’s not bad either,” cried Aunt Piroska, holding her sides with laughter. "I’ll have a go, too!” She lifted a brick with both hands, and with her weak, old arms threw it at the hut, but the missile dropped exhausted a yard short of its target. "What an idiot I am,” the old woman muttered, and set her little beret recklessly on the crown of her head. At the sound of the window smashing, the women screamed and some started to run. A young girl fell to her knees in excitement. “Don’t hurt the poor guard!” she cried desperately. "Could he help it? His bird’s been killed!”
