Page 69 of Shadow Ticket
“Újpest. Pickup and delivery. Only be a couple of minutes.”
They arrive at a factory gate at quitting time. “What’s this?”
“Tungsram. We’re going around back.” Hundreds of women, on foot and bicycles. “Some girl-heavy workforce here.”
“Assembling radio valves is delicate work. Needs a light touch. Breakage rate’s too high, sorry boys, young ladies only. I hope you’re not as clumsy as you look. Here we are.”
They pull up by a loading dock where she’s handed a wooden crate, weighing hardly anything at all.
“Try not to break anything.”
“What’s in here, light bulbs?”
“Vacuum tubes. Experimental, specially designed for the theremin.”
“The…”
“It’s a musical instrument.”
Dimly, “Electrical gizmo, comes on the radio now and then. Mostly when there’s something weird happening.”
“As you’re about to see.”
Day shifts expire into the evening, city mobility all crossing paths, heading into town for a good time, hauling back out to homes in the outer districts, making the last pickups and deliveries of the day.
Club Hypotenuse is cheerfully neon-lit, so far having kept a dignified distance from the slobbering embrace of urban redevelopment, which hasalready destroyed Tabán, formerly a Serbian neighborhood on the Buda side, once known as the Montmartre of Budapest.
Around back, screeching into the tradespeople’s porte cochere, on into a dedicated elevator, which takes them zooming up to a rooftop terrace, a slowly rotating dance floor, an orchestra with not just one soloist on theremin but a half dozen, each expensively gowned tomato with more or less identical platinum bobs, waving their hands at these units and pulling music out of some deep invisibility, swooping one note to the next, hitting each one with pitch as perfect, Terike assures him, as the instrument’s reigning queen, Clara Rockmore. The joint effect of these six virtuoso cuties all going at once in close harmony is strangely symphonic.
“You’re just in time,” Terike’s friend Zsófi greets them, “we’re running through these tubes like nose tissues at a Garbo movie.”
“Sealex machines at Tungsram aren’t quite up to speed yet, they’re cranking these out as fast as they can by hand.”
They find a table in a corner. “Here,” taking the cigarette that was in her mouth and putting it into Hicks’s.
“What’s this, it ain’t tobacco.”
“Known here as fu. Where’d you say you were from again?”
“We have this in Milwaukee, don’t smell exactly the same, is all.”
—
Terike grew upin a bourgeois zone if not often enchanted at least comfortable, no idea of what it was costing to maintain till it all came to pieces at the onset of the Béla Kun government, which in less than five months caused incalculable damage in Hungary, families driven into ruin when not stood against walls and shot, wars on two or three fronts with armies of brand-new nations stooging for the Entente that created them, not to mention Miklos Horthy down in Szeged with his own government of bloodthirsty vigilantes, eagerly on the lookout for the vacuum that would suck him into power…
Still a girl in those days, easily frightened, not yet political, watching her family slide closer to the social abyss as the days passed…till Horthy camemarching into town, churches celebrating Te Deum masses, much loose talk of “deliverance”…soon enough understanding that this self-styled “Regency” was only to be the next form of terror, White Terror replacing Red, out to settle its own scores.
For years she thought she’d been named after the Empress Maria Theresa. When she was fifteen, not the best time to be finding out, her mother admitted that it was really after Ste. Thérèse de Lisieux, known as “the Little Flower.”
“You wanted me to be a good girl.”
“And it’s what you’ve grown up to be.”
“Mama, we both know better, all the candles you must’ve lit, see if somebody won’t give you a refund.”
Now here comes this oversize American gangster…Is there time to steer around and keep going? Should she stop and take a look?
“I can corrupt you, you know.”
