Coal Cellar

Coal Cellar

By Zary Fekete

In 1983, when I was eleven, my best friend Gabor lived in an apartment on Feherlo Street in the 11th district of Budapest. We played there after school most days. The building was built before the turn of the 20th century and there were many hidden caverns and hallways in the labyrinthine cellar space.

Each apartment in the building had access to a cellar storage space, a feature of all Hungarian buildings built in the 1800s (or earlier). Some apartments used the storage spaces to hold old luggage or other unneeded household items, but many Hungarian families transformed their cellar spaces into makeshift wine cellars or places to store winter vegetables because the temperature in the cellar was always fifteen degrees cooler than above ground. 

The building caretaker was an elderly man named Badics Jozsef. Gabor and I called him Jozsi Bacsi (Uncle Joe). He had a thick ring of keys that opened various doors in the building, including most spaces in the cellar. He told us to ring his doorbell whenever we wanted to access the backyard—which we often did to play in the sandbox or swing on the rope swing: a jerry-rigged coil of thick, industrial rope that hung over a ravine choked with stinging nettles and dandelions—or get into the attic, another storage space usually filled with papers and books, protected from the dampness of the cellar.

One day after school Gabor’s mother sent us to the cellar to bring up a jar of her homemade cherry preserves. Gabor and I raced each other to slide down the banister for four flights to the ground floor, then we descended into the cool air of the basement. There, we saw Jozsi Bacsi, who was just locking an imposing metal door at the far end of a hallway that we had never noticed before.

 “What’s in there?” I inquired

“That?” Jozsi Bacsi asked, his eyes twinkling, “That’s the coal cellar.”

Jozsi Bacsi told us the building used to be coal-heated, but during the socialist era,  it was converted to the familiar “district heating”, which he said epitomized the “wastefulness of the Communists.” Distance heating brought hot water into the building from remote factories on the outskirts of Budapest. The water reached the building via long, looping pipes, poorly insulated with shaggy sheets of asbestos, often with the evidence of their poor construction as the asbestos dripped off and puddled in messy piles below the pipes. Gabor and I often amused ourselves after school by gathering the gloppy insulation into makeshift “snowballs” and throwing them at each other for fun, filling the air with volleys of poison.

Jozsi Bacsi shared with us a different clandestine memory from his school days in the 1920s. Back then, he and his schoolmates worked on the coal cart, a horse-drawn carriage that brought black and brown chunks of coal from the mine just outside the 11th district, west of Budapest. He and his friends were not paid much for this work, usually just a few pengo coins, but apparently the job had a secret benefit.

“We rode the cart through the streets on its way to this building,” Jozsi Bacsi said. “One of us kept watch for the cops, while the other two boys tossed pieces of coal into the bushes along our route.” Then he said they retraced their route after the delivery, picking up the hidden coal to trade it with gypsies on the outskirts of the city for homemade sausage or moonshine.

Jozsi Bacsi chuckled and then asked if we wanted to see the inside of the coal cellar. He took out his key ring and turned a huge key in the metal door. The door creaked loudly, its hinges rarely used now that the building’s coal days were far behind it. Beyond the door lay a cavern entirely black. Jozsi Bacsi took out a small flashlight and played the beam into the darkness. The floor was coated with black coal dust and the movement of the door opening dislodged a small puff of dust that seemed to hang in the still cellar air like a black, twinkling cloud. 

Once Jozsi Bacsi had relocked the door, Gabor and I retrieved the cherry preserves and delivered them to his mother upstairs. The coal cellar was temporarily forgotten as the afternoon gave on to other amusements. Now that I’m older, though, I remember it from time to time—usually, when I read something in the news about Hungary, a small country in central Europe still struggling to free itself from the lingering grip of its socialist past. Many Hungarians above a certain age have memories of small transgressions from their past, like Jozsi Bacsi and his friends in the coal cart. Taking advantage of opportunities, like sifting coal from the country’s cart, seemed a necessity of daily life. In many ways, it still is.