And so Imre Horváth and Charles Gábor met on July 15, 1990, though neither of them knew it yet.
III.
On the morning of July 16, 1947, when he was twenty-five, Imre Horváth buried his father, Károly, age sixty-nine, under bright sun at the Kerepesi Cemetery. The old man had himself, over the previous forty-six years, in Kerepesi’s densely populated Horváth-family vault, deposited an only daughter, three sons, and a wife, deceased from, respectively, typhus (1901), flu (1918), American bombardment (1944), Russian bombardment (1945), and intermingled German and Arrow Cross bombardment (1945). The elder Horváth had at last succumbed to chronic, untreated heart trouble.
That afternoon, following a dreary lunch with no one he knew very well or cared about at all, Imre walked, in the middle of a somber procession, to his father’s offices, in a building comparatively undamaged despite extensive, jagged evidence of warfare on either side of it. There, in that oasis of commerce, he conferred halfheartedly with the familiar, familial lawyer in a shaggy, patched suit. With ill-concealed boredom and a heart uncertain whether to grieve or not, Imre signed the absurdly formal documents that gave him control of his family’s worthless business. He became the sixth Horváth male to guide the Horváth Press since 1818.
IV.
The press was founded under another name in 1808; in 1818 it was purchased by Imre’s great-great-great-grandfather (also Imre).
The press’s actual founder—the printer Kálmán Molnár ( Molnár Kálmán in Hungarian)—had died as the result of a duel for which he was singularly ill prepared, never having fired a weapon in his life. Though Molnár initially survived the exchange of fire (and received some gossipy credit for having stood up and then fallen over like the gentleman he was not), he finally yielded, two weeks later, to an infection of the wound received in his thigh.
The death left stranded a widow and three and a third orphans. More to the first Imre Horváth’s interest, it also left without guardian a printing press, ink, plates, paper, binding equipment, and a storefront. Two hours after her husband’s death, the grieving, desperate widow accepted Horváth’s inconsiderable bid, and Horváth—who had watched her husband tumble over sideways in the grassy enclosure, having been hired to ferry the combatants to Margaret Island through the morning mist—became the owner of the quickly rechristened Horváth Press.
The first Imre’s great contribution to the business that would bear his family’s name for six generations was the Unicum-inspired design of its colophon—the logo printed at the bottom of the last page of books, in the corners of posters, and as the company’s general identifying trademark. The words A Horváth Kiadó encircled a small picture of an ornate dueling pistol. Out of the pistol’s barrel emerged a cloud of smoke and a speeding ball. On the ball were inscribed the letters MK, memorializing—to Imre’s private chuckle and solemn words of respect in public—Molnár Kálmán, the aimless, unwitting founder of the Horváth Press.
V.
Under the first Imre’s son, Károly, the Horváth Press son specialized in Hapsburg imperial announcements and publications (in Hungarian and German), pamphlet collections of poetry, and anti-Hapsburg political manifestos, which in the 1830s and 1840s proliferated with leporine fertility. By 1848, Károly’s father’s tasteless drawing fired on the bottom of imperial-government edicts pasted to kiosks, at the back of little volumes of János Arany’s verses, and on public-education bulletins of reform-minded Hungarian parliamentarians. The little pistol smoked at the end of a concise booklet celebrating the birthday of the simpleminded, epileptic Austrian emperor: A Volume in Honor of the Birthday of Our King and Emperor, Ferdinand Hapsburg, the Fifth of That Proud Name, Long May He Reign and May His Wisdom Guide Us, with God’s Blessings and to the Benefit of All His Loyal Hungarian Subjects Who Prosper Under His Paternal and Munificent Care. But the MK bullet also sped immobile on the last page of a collection of poems by the Hungarian revolutionary-poet-adventurer-lover Boldizsár Kis, entitled Birth Songs for My Country.
When Hungary—inspired in part by men like Arany and Kis—revolted against its Austrian emperor in 1848, Károly Horváth lost all of his contracts with the expelled imperial bureaucracy. He also lost a child. His first son, Viktor, was killed at the battle of Kápolna, an early clash between the squalling, newborn Hungarian Republic and its reflexively disciplinary Austrian parent. Soldiers of Hungarian origin fought on both sides. Viktor Horváth, age twenty-four, was hit with a cannonball, which sheared his head and neck entirely from his shoulders.
All was not necessarily lost for the press, however. The temporary existence of an independent Hungarian government promised ample replacement-business opportunities—announcements, legislation, ever more manifestos, and countless volumes by countless self-styled revolutionary poets. In an effort to win this business and burnish his ambiguous credentials, Károly Horváth inadvertently secured the lasting, glorious reputation of his press. Heroic Boldizsár Kis himself—in debt to Horváth for the sizable sum advanced to him for his Candid Recollections of a Lover—sealed this victory for the mourning publisher. At the zenith of the doomed rebellion, when the Hungarians seemed to have won their freedom from Vienna at last, Kis repeatedly (and thus famously) praised Károly Horváth’s press, citing it as the “conscience of the people and the memory of a nation.” In a letter recommending the press’s services to the new Hungarian government (later edited as an essay and published by the Horváth Press), Kis diplomatically ignored Horváth’s indiscriminate service to political parties of all stripes as well as to the Hapsburgs. The poet sang instead of the firm’s Magyar patriotism. He reminded his newly empowered and nervously overworked colleagues of the man’s son, sacrificed for revolution. More lastingly, he explained the hidden meaning of the Horváth Kiadó’s bold colophon, which had always clearly called for the freedom—from the barrel of a gun!—of the Hungarian Republic, the Magyar Köztársaság. MK. Of course, Horváth had been forced by commercial necessity to work for all sorts of clients, Kis conceded, but look at his trademark, his burning brand of revolutionary loyalty! The tottering new government—busy with an unfinished and unpredictable war of independence—distractedly awarded the press extensive contracts. A letter of praise and appreciation was even written to Horváth over an ambiguously legible but very possibly highly influential name.
In an 1849 volume of his poetry—published again at Horváth’s expense, but with all sales payable directly to the printer until the poet’s lingering debt was recouped—Kis included this complimentary verse:
From our brave men of ink and press
Come tidings of a new dawning age
And with the force of a ball from a pistol shot
Cracks loud the news of what can no longer be denied:
Our republic, our republic, our republic!
When, in the fall of 1849, with Russian help, the Hapsburgs reasserted their control over the troublesome Magyars and unleashed a horrific thunderstorm of reprisal executions, imperial government pronouncements and condemnation posters were decorated at the bottom by a familiar symbol. After Boldizsár Kis had vanished into the Levant, the poster that declared him an enemy of the emperor-king bore the Horváth logo, but then again so did the much-cherished copies of Kis’s poetry, editions of which sold better than ever since he had become a fugitive, finally recouping (and then some) Horváth’s advances to the escaped poet.
VI.
Károly Horváth’s second son, Miklós, was slightly too young for revolution and warfare and so in 1860 he inherited the press that would have been his late elder brother’s. That same year, his own son (and only acknowledged offspring) was born and received the name of his great-grandfather. Miklós delivered a verse for the occasion:
The boy will become the man
The man will become the boy
Sing, Muses, for Imre, the Magyar hero
Who will lead us to a world of light and righteousness!
Under Miklós’s administration, the Horváth Pr
ess suffered severe setbacks due to inattention; Miklós was more enchanted by his efforts at poetry than by running a business. He allowed his assistants to make nearly all company decisions, deal with customers and writers, and negotiate with the refreshed Austro-Hungarian monarchy. They were also allowed to manage the firm’s financial matters, which many of them did to their personal advantage and the press’s slow but steady decline. Even the most honest of his assistants paled when forced to face the inevitable losses inflicted by the compulsory publication of Miklós’s poetry, volume after volume hurled upon an indifferent world, in progressively more ornate editions and optimistic quantities.
When Miklós was not halfheartedly dabbling in his family’s business, he was to be seen in Budapest’s cafés and brothels, wearing his hair long in the Byronic fashion of four decades past, demanding paper, pen, and ink from barmaids or whores. He would disappear from his wife and child for days at a time to roam the countryside on foot and then return with pages stained with paeans to nature and his own untamable spirit.
In 1879, invoking Boldizsár Kis, János Arany, Sándor Petőfi, and the rest of the Hungarian revolutionary-poet pantheon of the generation preceding his, Miklós published his final collection, Where Are the Heroes of Verse? Each poem in the book was ostensibly written in the style of one of his poetical masters, each singing the praises of, and predicting immortal greatness for, Miklós Horváth. Sándor Petőfi chimed in from his unmarked grave outside the Siberian prison camp to which the Hapsburgs had dispatched him post-revolution:
Sing of brave Miklós whose heart thumps the anthem of
all Hungary
Who marches over country road and city street leading all the
Laughing children
And women with breasts like Greek melons.
The poet dedicated the book to his brother, Viktor (“Who fell for his Emperor”), and had it bound—over his manager’s confused protests and stuttering monologues about cost—in kid leather with gold inlay nymphs and sirens, three fine parallel strips of black velvet running the length of the spine and the poet’s signature stamped across the cover in yet more gold. Thirty-seven copies were sold. Thousands more perished ten months later, when heavy rains swirled through a storage basement.
Miklós’s son, Imre, turned twenty in 1880 and, though still living in his parents’ home, already had a wife and two-year-old twins, Károly and Klára. Imre hardly knew his father. Raised by his mother, Judit, under limited circumstances, Imre had worked at the press from an early age. He had no illusions about where money came from or what life was like in its absence or how his father’s business judgment had fared. At age twenty, he watched his father, the failed and foolish poet of forty-seven and the owner of a rapidly failing company, suffer from late-stage syphilis, which had literally cost him his nose and only a few months later would leave him entirely blind.
Miklós’s decline—which proceeded with a gruesome implacability—spurred him to drink heavily and write nearly constantly. It drove the melting man to melancholic gestures, and a shallow but sentimental appreciation of the family he had ignored for years during his fruitless courtship of an unwilling and uninterested muse. Miklós, feeling in his corrupted veins that his imaginative and expressive powers were at their peak precisely because darkness was falling, now wrote odes to his illness, to death and encroaching night. He scrawled his verse in a trembling, wandering, half-blind hand that, lost in the thickening mist, roamed across pages then circled back, leaving knotted tangles of ink stranded in vast white spaces. His wife and son would find these poems outside their bedroom doors in the morning. By then, the poet himself would have left the house again for a favorite brothel, where he paid no longer for pleasure but only for the comfort of familiar voices and blurry faces of those who nursed him with limited skill but professional affection, at the same rates he was accustomed to being charged. His underdressed nursing staff brought him pen and ink, paper and drink.
The twenty-year-old son—husband and father himself—knew that his own economic security demanded certain steps. While Miklós’s latest scribbled pages fed the kitchen fire, Imre consulted with his one trusted parent on how best to proceed. Later that day, with the help of his mother and two loyal managers, the second Imre Horváth became the de facto head of the Horváth Press and began straining to right his family’s capsized firm. This was still some months before the death of the previous owner, who clung to life until January 1881, though neither his family nor his business heard from him again.
Apologetically but definitively turned out of his previous residence on December 23, 1880, for frightening other customers with his howls of syphilitic suffering (serving as an inadvertent warning label on the establishment’s otherwise alluring product), Miklós was taken into the home of an admirer, one of his prostitutes, a woman of thirty-four who had pleasured him the first of several hundred times when she was thirteen, producing along the way two live children, among others. He died in her scarcely furnished, tiny attic cube, on the floor, on a thin mattress, under a splintered shelf that, in his total blindness, he could not see but which supported one copy of every volume of his published work—eleven collections in all. His unearthly wailing brought obscene complaints from the other residents of her building, but for eight days she fed him and cleaned him, though he did not know where he was or who he was or who was with him. She was holding a damp cloth to his scarred and seeping forehead when at last he died. “Finally, light,” he said, though his eyes were closed. She remembered his last words for many years.
VII.
The second Imre majestically guided the Horváth Press to its golden pinnacle of influence and glory. From his unopposed coup in 1880 until his own death thirty-three years later at the age of fifty-three, the family business grew to occupy a place very near the center of a culture in renaissance, a politics in loquacious reform, and a city in feverish reconstruction. Though several new publishers appeared and offered overdue competition, there were suddenly more than enough Hungarian geniuses in every field to go around and more appetite for newspapers, magazines, and books than ever before. The colophon of the little gun—now encircled by Kis’s celebrated words a horváth kiadó—the memory of our people—emblazoned the published plays, novels, poems, histories, political essays, scientific and mathematical treatises, textbooks, and sheet music of a society blooming into a verdant artistic and scholarly springtime. The company’s fortunes, like those of its home city, peaked in the early 1900s. The population swelled, education spread, peace reigned. Hungarian translations of Shakespeare, Dickens, Goethe, and Flaubert joined native works under the Horváth aegis.
The press (and Imre) prospered and prospered. His weekly sports newspaper, Corpus Sanus, was a profitable venture from its third issue, but he would have had a booming business if one accounted only for his production of brightly colored advertising posters for concerts and cafés, operas and plays, liquors and tobacco, haberdashers and clothiers, sporting events, art exhibits, and travel opportunities. His financial paper, Our Forint (later Our Korona, Our Pengő, and yet later Our Forint), was widely read in business circles, but he also happily accepted his large fee, in 1890, to publish the manifesto of the first Hungarian socialist workers’ party. And only a fool would turn down government contracts, Emperor-King Franz Josef notwithstanding. The little pistol smoked away. MK! Imre shed the memory of life in his parents’ sparsely furnished and gloomy home. He began to understand that he was more than a successful businessman.
Imre—proud of his wardrobe and his apartments, his wealth and his business acumen, the family and national tradition of which he was the embodiment—considered himself and described himself to others as a man of culture, a man of letters. In Budapest’s increasingly liberal society, his lack of formal education did not disqualify him from that claim. Imre considered himself a giant straddling two worlds—commerce and art—and he frequented the social clubs of both. While he was heartily welcomed and unaffectedly admired
in the company of publishers, printers, and newspaper writers, he was still Miklós’s son and he felt more himself, more welcome, and more happily a leader among artists, writers, and actors. He would often say to his wife, “The artists recognize me for what I am; the publishers merely envy me for what I have achieved.” He was a member of the KB, a group of writers and artists that met regularly at the Gerbeaud for evenings of drink and recitation, praise and insult. Named for Boldizsár Kis, the clique was also a discussion group about politics, particularly the issue of Hungarian independence. Somewhere in the course of such talks Imre would toast the memory of his uncle Viktor who fell at Kápolna for Hungary’s short-lived freedom from Vienna.
But no matter that he thought himself a man of letters, no matter that many members of the KB relied on him for their livelihood, no matter that the artists were polite, even jovially friendly to him at the Gerbeaud: He was not one of them, though the fact escaped him (except in sad, quickly forgotten moments of solitude and clarity).
Endre Horn, the playwright, used Imre as the model for Swindleton, the crooked English businessman in his farce Under Cold Stars, going so far as to give the character a twin son and daughter. Imre never noticed the similarity. The poet Mihály Antall penned lines (rhyming in Hungarian) that were passed from hand to hand and referred to obliquely in conversation but which Imre never saw:
When the businessmen grow tasteful,
And walk with dainty steps,
And lecture us of Shakespeare,
Then who shall buy the drinks?
“What has become of the memory of our people?” they would ask if Imre did not appear at the Gerbeaud. “I submit to the memory of our people,” they would answer, smiling, when Imre continued to argue a position everyone else at the table silently judged as philistine. “To the memory of our people!” They would raise their glasses when the bill arrived. “It seems the memory of our people is short,” quipped the composer János Bálint, passing along the rumor of a child born to Imre by a woman not his wife. “Poor memory,” they quietly murmured at the funeral of Klára, the twin daughter, dead from pneumonia. “Memory fades,” they said nervously whenever Imre’s business stumbled, and again when he began to grow thinner and alarmingly thinner from the long sickness that eventually killed him.