I first read “The Vanished City Hall” one extremely foggy morning, on Mr. Bajnai’s historical blog, as I was just waking up. We had had a series of foggy days, so when I came to the part that mentioned the fog—“With regard to the disappearance of the Szolnok city hall, it is worth noting that that weekend was especially cold and so foggy that you couldn’t even see Kossuth Square from the nearby buildings”—I began to wonder whether this had actually happened: whether the city hall had been taken away and I simply hadn’t noticed. As I read further, I found more and more hints that this was a satire (for one thing, it was assigned to the blog’s “Szolnok Stories” category), but on my way to work, I bicycled by the city hall just to make sure. By then the fog had lifted, and the domes glistened in the sun. When translating this story, I tried to convey both the rhythm of the language and the bizarre plausibility of the plot. The former required rearrangement of the sentences at times; the latter required colloquial flexibility. I strove to convey not only the events, but the many voices of the many characters, from the anonymous complainant to the “ridiculed local architect-historian.” I enjoyed the time spent with the words and hope that the English translation will reach many readers.
—Diana Senechal, translator
By Monday morning Szolnok’s city hall had disappeared. To wit: on the plot at the corner of Kossuth Square and Táncsics Street, on the flattened, muddy soil, nothing was left but some construction debris and truck tire marks. And the worn metal fence, which had been erected around the building as early as Friday. What had become of the building was anyone’s guess.
“On Friday afternoon we noticed some people putting up a fence around the city hall,” said a resident of the house across Kossuth Square who requested anonymity. “It didn’t even occur to us that something fishy was up. We thought they were re-renovating the building. My wife even said that this was Brussels all over again. She meant that the union must have funded some newfangled idiocy.”
From neighboring Táncsics Street, on Friday afternoon, someone started placing phone calls to various authorities. He called the police, public places, even the city hall, because, according to later hearsay, he was furious that people would operate enormous machines on the weekend in downtown Szolnok. After the fence-builders left, the excavators, conveyed in the same trailer to the site, got down to work. In retrospect, you could deduce that the perpetrators had been playing it safe. Their demolition of the city hall, built in 1884, began from the courtyard. This way, until Sunday evening, locals could sense that something was happening behind this neoclassical building’s street facades only because huge dump trucks turned up in great density, plowing the cobblestone roads not only around Táncsics street, but around the theatre and Verseghy Park.
The police told the caller on Friday afternoon that this case was outside of their purview until blood flowed or a crime was committed. True, they had sent a patrol once or twice to the site because of the noise. It could later be gleaned from the reports that each time they came, they warned the noisemakers to knock it off, and each time they received a promise in return. So after the fourth or fifth call, the Miskolc center no longer forwarded the notices to Szolnok. They later explained that after so many calls they began to suspect a prank.
With regard to the disappearance of the Szolnok city hall, it is worth noting that that weekend was especially cold and so foggy that you couldn’t even see Kossuth Square from the nearby buildings. Not only that, but it just so happens that this, the city’s main square, is basically deserted except during Advent and a few summer weekends, so hardly anyone heads there on non-workdays. Still more important—and a ridiculed local architect-historian brought this to our attention years ago—is that Szolnok has long been accustomed to weekend demolitions, old buildings disappearing, all sorts of investment projects without any advance announcement or on-site notice. Later it turned out that the perpetrators knew about none of this yet benefited from it. “Probably all of this started with a real estate sale contract that had been switched with another by mistake,” stated the police officer originally in charge of the investigation, who was convinced he had been fired on the go because the facts—forget about how much time he had put into assembling them—seemed so incredible that those with a stake in covering up the case could easily chalk them up to incompetence. “The contract of sale for the apartment building at Kossuth Square 7-8 was carelessly replaced at some time or other with the decades-older contract for number 9, and thus only the transfer of Kossuth Square 9 was valid. This faulty contract then ended up, through an inheritance lawsuit, in the hands of a resourceful local lawyer, who was up to his neck in debt, from which he essentially released himself through the sale of the city hall.” In the former policeman’s seemingly unbelievable report, it appears that, with the sale contract that he had acquired for pennies, the lawyer paid off Serbian creditors, who in turn paid Bulgarian human smugglers with the title to a larger building in the center of an unknown Hungarian city. Later the property, which had never actually been seen by anyone in this succession of deals, and which in the meantime had been described as a “nineteenth-century eclectic office building,” went on paper in a thick dossier to an investor, and from him to an Austrian financial institution as collateral for defaulted loans. Then, during the bank’s year-end balance beautification process, thanks to a recommendation prepared by a Hungarian junior clerk working in Austria and supplemented with photos, topographic identifier, and building history, a Hungarian big businessman became the owner of that basemented, storied, domed building.
After the disappearance of the Szolnok city hall, the only one to break the scandal was someone who relied on classical journalistic devices, so that in a weekly newspaper reaching barely a couple of people, one of the sources with knowledge of the case claimed that the above process had taken about three years to complete, during which time no one in Szolnok had guessed that the city hall’s papers would change hands in billion-forint deals. Thus no one had any idea that the big businessman did not buy the city hall from the Austrian bank entirely of his own accord, but handed over the property the next day to a well-known oligarch, whose twenty-two-year-old child living in Thailand currently monopolized Hungarian real estate.
“You don’t need money to get something stamped quickly,” an erstwhile construction instructor admitted resignedly. “It’s enough to have a formidable name that makes everyone spring to attention, and you can even push your own death sentence through the system. Probably in that case you wouldn’t need to put a pistol to anyone’s head to get the necessary permits.”
There were a few permits, actually. Or at least no one split hairs over them. However, in the six-floor building at Kossuth Square 9 in Szolnok, on the central, well-situated plot, the investor dreaming of luxury apartments and elegant boutique stores had no use for them. He needed the plot cleared as soon as possible, since, according to one of his acquaintances, who asked that his name be withheld, he had said a week before the Szolnok incident: “I shit on all these old Szolnok cottages, they’re just blocking my profit. They can all be scrapped.” And since he had enough money to convert the plot, Szolnok’s city hall was scrapped too.
“We are just laborers, we do what the customer says,” came the later confession from the unskilled grapple operator, who became the only police suspect in the case, on account of his demonstrable involvement in the demolition. “I visited this building in the past, I remember that it was very nice and that important people come and go in it. But, well, in the last decades so many beautiful and interesting things have vanished from our midst. Moreover, a small man does not ask questions when given an order. They told us that we had to get rid of everything in one weekend. Except for the street facade.”
Because as it turned out later, the street façade was dismantled by another subcontractor’s unannounced men in the wee hours from Sunday to Monday. Another worker who later retracted his confession claimed that, given the risk of accident, for damage control they had to work especially fast at night. By four in the morning on Monday the plot was empty as a yawn.
By Monday morning the thick fog in Szolnok had risen. The sun came out too. Anyone could see that the city hall had vanished. Those hurrying to work, school, shopping didn’t worry much about it; only the office staff asked in frustration what to do. But since there was no city hall, there was nowhere to receive orders from, so they went home instead. And in astonishment they followed the announcements on the community pages, which for two days kept mum about the city hall’s disappearance. This was partly because the city’s radio news was edited not in Szolnok but elsewhere, the daily newspaper was written by reporters who didn’t budge from the editorial office, and the city television generally broadcasted canned programs that no one watched. The news that started to spread later on Facebook about Szolnok’s city hall was denied or affirmed more and more violently, according to party affiliation, by the followers of the two sides, who a few posts later forgot why they had been lunging at each other’s throats. Later, around Thursday, the national press started to take up the case. Again, only according to party divisions, the inconceivable story of the disappearance of Szolnok’s city hall was refuted here, confirmed there. They derived their information not from the scene itself, but from social networking posts. By Friday, an even greater absurdity in another city had everyone riled up, so they gave up dissecting the architectural, local-historical problem of this not-too-significant county seat worth a small news blurb at most. And as it tends to happen, the uproar over the case slowly died away. Everyone had argued themselves out, everyone had pointed the finger at someone, and then they went about their business, and the plot stands empty.
The following Monday, no one cared any more that the 125-year-old city hall had disappeared. The city hall officials were now deployed in terribly upscale rental offices. And since, according to every register, the city hall’s erstwhile plot had gone to one of the firms of the well-known oligarch’s son living in Thailand, and there was no lawyer who would undertake the litigation, they officially dropped the subject and let bygones be bygones. It may have also helped that suddenly a multi-billion-forint government fund opened up, from which it was possible, ignoring all rules and regulations, to fund the building of a new, European-quality city hall.
At the time of the celebratory laying of the new building’s foundation stone, I let the whole thing go. Not because I was weary of the situation where, if I put the fate of a beautiful, old Szolnok building into words, the authorities would call me an enemy and anyone with an interest in the investment would send hitmen after me. Rather, because I didn’t understand why, specifically at the estuary of the Tisza and the Zagyva rivers, on top of roads leading to the bridge, in the middle of Liberty Square, it was necessary to build the new City Hall, when there had been no celebratory hoeing for a second downtown Tisza bridge, although it had been promised for decades.
Translated from the Hungarian by Diana Senechal
Zsolt Bajnai has been writing since childhood. However, it took him about a quarter-century to dare show others what was born first on a typewriter, now on a keyboard. Meanwhile he earned degrees in history/geography teaching and journalism; since his early twenties he has been working in communications. Yet if asked, he would say, “I am a freelance welder of letters, of dubious existence, who has been publishing fiction on his blog since 2010. Occasionally he enters competitions, with varying success. So far, three volumes of his stories have appeared. And the thing he dreads most is hitting the last character before he can tell all his ideas.” His writings often evoke Eastern European existence and the history of the past century. Through a little man’s eyes, history is disquieting. He tries to relate what happened in everyday life and how we tried to survive it all.
Diana Senechal is the 2011 winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities and the author of two books of nonfiction, as well as numerous essays, stories, poems, and translations. Her translations (from the Lithuanian) of Tomas Venclova’s poetry are featured in the books Winter Dialogue (1997) and The Junction (2008); her translations of the Hungarian authors Gyula Jenei and Zsolt Bajnai have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Literary Matters, The Massachusetts Review, The Satirist, and here. She lives and teaches in Szolnok, Hungary. For more about her work, please see her website.
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