Fabulya’s Wives and Other Stories     by Iván Mándy, Translated by John Bákti Original title: Fabulya feleségei (1959), Előadók, társszerzők (1970) Original language: Hungarian Published by Budapest, Corvina Pub. Date: 1999 Format: 163 pages Not available for ordering

This slim but fascinating book puts together a racy and insightful novella from 1959 ‘Fabulya’s Wives’ and some later less politically constrained stories about a similar milieu written in the 1970s. ‘Fabulya’s Wives’ is about the little Bohème of freelance radio writers and journalists in 1950s Budapest and is a very rich little novella, sharply capturing different angles of this existence such as the painful business of being a jobbing writer:

having to face...those sheets of paper. Papers, papers all over the place... Scraps of paper sticking out of drawers, piled on the night stand; lines from a radio play, a paragraph from an old short story; illegible scraps.

Mr. Fabulya himself is discussed by various fellow scribes who reminisce about him, generally around the theme of his succession of curious wives — hence the book’s title. These reminiscences abound with little flashes of wider illumination as when one wife allows herself to be picked up and is then led down a ‘quiet’ side street by an aspiring suitor to find it lined with folk on stools outside their doors happily shouting across at each other — a whole way of life, pre-motor car, pre-cellphone is conjured up, when city streets truly had a life of their own. Fabulya’s rented room is also a pretty lively place, with its other inhabitants; ‘those cats on the bed, on the chair and on the table, grim old tomcats with clunky heads’. In stark contrast to the clunky-headed ones is wife number two, the sparkling young scapegrace Adél. Fabulya’s subsequent difficulties with her could be predicted from the touching scene when he goes to ask her father for her hand; ‘Son, she’s all yours, the old man said. He didn’t even look up from his Racing News.’

Here then is a fascinating account of a Bohemian life that managed to exist even under Communism, a picture outlined around the figure of the marvellously neurotic Fabulya, writer and book-dealer and which includes an interestingly anti-romantic and frank view of sex, of its difficulties, its offering and its taking, as when another wife, Eszter, in an act of maximum disloyalty, steals Fabulya’s most prized book while he is in hospital to sell it for the benefit of the man she has now fallen for, a little-employed bit-part actor.

The later pieces from 1970 include the very funny ‘Lecturer Arrives’ which sends up Adult Education in 1950s Hungary — as a more human atmosphere than the one the Party requires at improving lectures breaks through — while ‘Lecturer Disappears’ outlines the operations of political correctness in an atmosphere of round-ups and of old age pensioners being ‘re-settled’ in the countryside to work on collective farms. More reality about socialism rather than socialist realism in ‘Lecture on Castle Hill’ when an adult education lecturer is despatched to a construction site to sermonise on the benefits of reading only to find a bread riot brewing...

Mándy’s book is full of neat little insights into everyday life in Communist Hungary — neither the high drama of anti-Communist melodrama or the hysterical bathos of Marxist myth-making, just a light shone into corners otherwise poorly illuminated...

Once I showed up early at one of the student homes. I was going to lecture on a book, of course. What book? You think I remember? Something about a kolkhoz, a tractor brigade and a one-armed soldier looking at a statue in a garden... I think it was a home for apprentice electricians. Formerly it must have been a cheap residential hotel, in a dank little side street off the boulevard. The kind of neighbourhood where the streetwalkers are past talking to you, they only give you the eye. Like those fifty-cent women under the bridge. A grim and crusty front door maybe it hadn’t opened in twenty years. Above it, the sign; ‘Gyula Kulich Student Home’. What did this man Kulich have to do, to get his name up on that sign? Had he been dragged off and shot?

The receptionist was a lanky boy with pimples all over his face. He had a scarf wrapped around his neck and was spooning potatoes from a pot balanced in his lap. On the wall behind him the sign; ‘The Heroic Leninist Komsomol Shows the Way’. 132