An architect in an unnamed city considers his life, his work, and the many-layered history of the city he and his family—architects all—have contributed to building. In the days after World War II—during which American bombers destroyed much of what his father built—he becomes a Stalinist planner and realizes that the power of the nobility, the wealthy and the bourgeois has been usurped by technocrats. Vanished by those technocrats into the communist underworld of torture and imprisonment, he is eventually released into a post-Stalinist world and becomes the chief builder in a provincial town.
Told with wit and elegance by one of Hungary's greatest novelists, The City Builder is one of the most important and impassioned books about the indignities of living in—and contributing to—a cruelly depersonalized society.
A flurry at dawn, uncertain hour . . . scarlet light embraces the brick walls. Things swarming out of the shelter of half-light being their forced orbit. The waste products of consumption are ready for the garbage truck, the electric pistol for the sedated cattle, eager officers for VHF commands, the unpredictable switchman for steadfast engines . . . Sleeping eyes are still free from a hail of stimuli, sleeping hands are damp and crumbling matter, sleeping mouths from hostile words and the hurried repertory of curses, please, boasts, thighs and testicles from a creeping hand making its uncertain rounds, the organs of the body from warring cells, the brain from a showcase of meaningless parables, terrifying pretenses, anniversary clichés. Perspiring skin breathing on crumpled sheets; drooping mouth discoursing with the stale air; nightmares fighting out their battles on the eye’s inner field of vision—a limp parcel stamped PERISHABLE. But it is still the uncertain hour, when the shock troops of light invade the furrows of a ravaged face, and each passing second is tapped out on a brain teeming with slogans of a paltry past.
Snapshots are swimming in fixing solution and are then put in a bulging album that has a certificate of birth on its first page, of death on the last, and a name on the cover: mine. The light of the lantern wanders through a dusty storeroom, making endless circles and then focusing on a few privileged objects. Filled with hatred, I take stock of my random memories, scrabbling about careless, touching unpleasant surfaces, thinking I ought to turn on the light in the damp, run-down room. Day after day I drag along the dead stock of this giant thriftshop, vowing that one day I will discard all that is useless. I remember things I have never seen; the world is filled with signals, and I let the language of things penetrate me. Solid crusts, walls, and pressure-resistant edifices are shattered by the tremors of my consciousness. And the voiceless barrage does not let up—traffic jams on the road network of the brain, final sale in the window of a burning department store. The clock strikes every fifteen minutes—chapter endings from the dime novel of my dreams. Another morning: I managed once more to traverse the foul-smelling bestiary of my mind.
At exactly 6:00 A.M., high over the mountain, the airliner breaks through the polar region of fleecy clouds. Bulls of the sky, winged alarm bells, the fourteen-cylinder engines bellow in their pens and upset my dreams. Thirty fragile heads undulate in the air, ride on the current, and find their way into the faint first images of the day. I follow them to the landing strip and stare with impartial concentration at the movement of light on the riveted aluminum flatness, at the elusive patterns of the terrain slipping by underneath. The redundant components of the landscape are stored, perhaps forever, in the deepest recesses of my memory, though from its surface they dry up like raindrops in the sand. The last-minute rush before saying good-bye; you take apart and store a receding face that you never had a chance to observe. Like an unsuspecting smuggler that I carry my pictures with me, and consider myself lucky that the customs inspector doesn’t make me take out my false teeth.
Requests in four languages are turned on, illuminating strips of frosted glass on the cabin wall. I fasten my seat belt, put out my cigarettes—slight tumbles in the turbulent air, and the uneasy thoughts of arrival are pushed out by the aerial view of a city. Underneath the jagged line of hard-shelled mountaintops and wooded, rocky slopes, we see a glistening tangle of pipes; water tanks look like metallic bomb crates, side-tracked freight cares are filled with tanks. We spot a smoldering pit, smoky-red slag heaps, and silvery-cold storage vans on paved-over grass. Radar screens turn batlike toward us. Soon the city, with its pierced walls, its streets branching out like cracked glass, comes into full view—a wrinkled stone palm, concrete time, apologetic historians’ revolving stage. Too much rhetoric, not enough sanity on the silence-craving main square; festive and unhappy ceremonies; opening of cathedrals, power plants, carnivals, parades. And wars, plagues, mass murders, a cavalcade of comic and tragic masks on the reviewing stand, high theatricals, farces, morality plays . . . I step out onto the runway, blinking, feeling the chill. Frayed leaves—lepers on a frozen river—are tossed by the irritable wind; they huddle under the rolling stairway, seeking asylum. The civilian air corridor is empty; before noon only delta-winged bombers, on routine maneuvers, fly in formation over the mountain.
In the sodden garden water drips from the vine, a wasp is dying on the dome of a honey drop; rose scent, like a crazy parachute, hovers over the rosebush, and a grayish-white face recedes into the wall. The crown of mud begins to lift from my brain; through the narrow slits of my half-closed eyes I see the black-hooded, thin-fingered lady emerging from her golden rings. She holds the ascetic baby in her arms and is accompanied by curious birds with singed legs and by root-faced inconstant saints. Summer is almost over; the glassy shimmer of the afternoon air is trapped between the equestrian statutes. Deserted cities and positioned mother-of-pearl tanks drift over cathedral towers aimed at God. Wild pigeons—these leaflets of immutability, feathery playthings of the early autumn wind—take off from brown roof tiles, their oarlike wings and bewigged lizard heads swaying in the hollow space above the apostles; stone skulls. For brief moments they seem to freeze to the grooves of the church clock, but the clangor erupting from the open belfry shoots them back under the protective helmet of the twin towers. Silver in a field of gray—heraldic animals on morning’s airy shield.
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