Csardas (25 page)

That evening Eva knocked on the door of Papa’s study and glided in without waiting for an answer. Papa was sitting with a book in his lap, but hé wasn’t reading; he was staring straight ahead of him. She hurried across and sat at his feet, resting her head despondently upon his knee.

“Oh, Papa! I feel so miserable!”

He began to stroke her hair, indulgently, as though enjoying the feel of her soft curls against his palm.

“Everything is changing. Mama and Malie seem so... so separate from us all. And even Jozsef and Leo can talk about nothing but Karoly and Amalia.” She darted a sly glance up at him. His mouth was firmed into a straight line, his eyes wrinkled in puzzled irritation. “I sometimes think, darling Papa, that only you and I care about the family.”

The band stroking her hair ceased to move. In a cold, remote voice he asked, “What do you mean, Eva? We are as united as ever we were, all of us: your Uncle Alfred and Aunt Gizi, Kati, and all of us—”

“Oh, yes, Papa!” she cried hurriedly. “Of course! I know Malie loves us all really; it is just, with Karoly, she has no time for me at the moment. You know how I love to be with the family, Papa. I’m so lonely. Malie doesn’t want to be with me any more, and you are busy with the war.” Her delicate face, the eyes brilliant with neglect and unhappiness, turned towards him. “I’m so miserable here on my own. The little boys don’t want me, and Mama doesn’t want me, and you are away in Budapest all the time....” Tears rolled gently down her unmarked face. She felt so sad at the way everyone was mistreating her.

“You have your friends, my darling,” he chided gently. “You know I have always encouraged you to have friends.”

“But they are not the same as you, Papa,” she said, adoring him. “And when you go away I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

He stroked her hair again, gazing down into the beautiful, entreating face. “How would it be, my dear,” he asked, “if I took you on a little trip to Budapest? When I go up next on business, would you like to come with me?”

“Oh, Papa! I don’t mind where I go if I am with you!”

“I cannot be with you all the time,” he reminded her. “I have business to attend to and you will be alone for part of the day.”

“I don’t mind, Papa.”

“Perhaps,” he said thoughtfully, “we can find some daughters of my colleagues at the bank to accompany you. Little trips, perhaps to the theatre? And we could ask Felix Kaldy to join us for one or two excursions.”

‘“Anything, Papa!”

She was so lovely, the way Marta had been. She was his daughter and she was obedient and dutiful, grateful for anything he arranged for her, happy to do his bidding instead of defying him like his elder daughter.

“That is settled then.” He patted her hand, feeling happier himself because he was once more a father with a loving, obedient child. “Now kiss me good night and go to bed. We will discuss the arrangements in the morning.”

“Good night, dearest, dearest Papa!”

She kissed his cheek. She was still sad for herself, because she had been so lonely and neglected, but very soon—immediately outside the door, in fact—she began to feel elated.

“I shall borrow Malie’s sealskin coat,” she said to herself. “I will ask Marie to shorten it tomorrow.” She had a moment’s guilt at the thought of actually altering Malie’s coat to fit herself, but she pushed the guilt away. Serve her right for not caring about me, she thought piteously, and then she did a few mazurka steps down the passage, humming to herself.

The following morning, bright, happy, and loving everyone at the breakfast table, she opened a letter from Felix. He was leaving Budapest that day following a posting—he could not say which—to one of the fronts.

The spring should have brought a sense of hope, a rising promise that the war—which was going well—would soon be over. On the Russian front the great victorious armies of last summer held their positions at a line well inside the enemy territory. The Russians, it was generally conceded by everyone who hadn’t actually fought them, were finished. As for the perfidious Italians, those betrayers who had dared to stab the Monarchy in the back, news had just filtered through of a large and glorious victory on the Isonzo. The Italians were being punished for their treachery. The fighting was fierce—yes, the Empire’s soldiers were falling—but for every icy alpine rock the Italians tried to defend, their soldiers too were destroyed. Soon they would be reduced, with their inferior weapons and bad organization, to the same routed condition as the Russians.

Serbia was crushed. The hated Balkan shepherds who dared to defy and temporarily conquer the Austro-Hungarian armies were now annihilated. Pushed steadily back into the mountainous hinterland of their own country, caught between the troops of the Empire in the north and the brave Bulgarians (who had decided to throw in their lot with the Central Powers) in the south-east, they were finally starved or frozen into defeat. Yes, everywhere one looked, on all three fronts, things were going well. So why was there no hope in the spring of 1916? Why did people walk a little more heavily and look sadder, more worried? Why was there a feeling of depression and apathy in the air?

The meat and bread queues were longer. There were more women in mourning, more wounded seen walking through the streets of the town. And there were rumours—oh, nonsense, of course!—but they planted seeds of disquiet in the most optimistic of hearts. The rumours stemmed from the soldiers returning on leave from the fronts. Leo and Jozsef, habitues of the kitchen, where Marie, who had a brother at the front, presided, reported chattily one morning that all the soldiers fighting in Russia had deserted. Papa rebuked them and sent them from the table, but the rumours persisted, leaking back through other quarters: all the troops, other than those of Austrian and Hungarian origin, were deserting from their regiments, in some cases joining the Russians in order to fight against their former masters.

And there was a sense, too, of this spring’s being somehow repetitious of the last. In the early months of 1915 it had been possible to look both back and forward, to say, “Oh, yes! This time last year we were going to poor cousin Kati’s birthday party. And this time next year the war will be over and perhaps we shall be thinking of getting married!” But now, in the spring of 1916, one could only look back to last year, when the war had been on, and then forward to some timeless point when, miraculously, it would all be over and, please God, Karoly and Felix would come home unharmed.

Felix had been sent to Serbia, had indeed been part of the victorious army that had vanquished the dirty Balkan shepherds, but Eva took no joy in his achievements for Felix had ceased to write to her at all, not even sending her a pink field postcard. She had to rely on news of him from the still faithful Adam, who wrote, now, from the Italian front. No longer were Adam’s letters tossed irritably to one side without being read; eagerly she scanned them, searching hungrily for a message relayed from Felix. Such comments as there were proved to be brief and unsatisfactory. “Mother reports that Felix is well.” “Mother hopes that soon Felix will be given some leave.” Leave! What good would that do her! Felix would go home to his wretched old witch of a mother and she wouldn’t see him at all, not unless his leave was postponed to the summer when they were all at the farm. Bitterness and hurt pride rankled within her, and combined with the rancour was deep and sincere distress. She prayed for him, prayed he would not be killed and prayed that whatever kept him from writing would soon be put right. At night she brooded and pondered any number of possibilities: that he had met and fallen in love with a Serbian girl, that his right hand had been injured and he had begged Adam not to tell her in case she worried, that he suspected she had grown tired of him and was in love with another. Oh, what did it matter if only he would write?

She began to hate Malie, scribbling away every day to Karoly and constantly receiving great bundles of letters in return. Malie was so happy, so proud of Karoly, so... smug!

The visit to Budapest had been miserable and a complete waste of time although for Papa’s sake she had had to pretend she was enjoying it. She had gone to the theatre, drunk wartime coffee at Gerbeaud, and generally hated the capital, which would have been so different if only she had visited it when Felix was there. There had been only one bright spot in the whole visit, when Papa had taken her to dinner one evening at a restaurant in Buda. He had arranged to meet a business client, a Mr. Klein, and had warned Eva beforehand that Mr. Klein was a very important man to the bank and Eva must therefore pay respectful attention to him.

She had worn her white dress, the one made specially for cousin Kati’s birthday party. The roses—so juvenile, how could she have thought they were
moderne?
—had been stripped off, a fall of blue lace added to the neck and sleeves, and a blue sash draped loosely—as was now the mode—round the waist. Mr. Klein had obviously been enchanted with the ravishing little Ferenc girl, and Papa had glowed with gratification. She had flirted (respectfully of course) with Mr. Klein, who seemed to be nearly forty and had a large, drooping moustache and very sad brown eyes.

The following morning a basket of roses had arrived at the hotel for Eva with a card signed by Mr. Klein.

“How lovely, Papa! But how expensive. Roses in November—and while the war is still on.”

Papa had smiled. “He obviously enjoyed his evening, Eva. And he is a very rich man. Yes, indeed... Mr. Klein is a very rich man.”

The admiration by Mr. Klein who was very rich had done something to ease the wound in her heart caused by Felix’s absence. But the roses had faded, and Budapest was cold and rather shabby in the wartime November, and finally she had been happy to return home.

This spring of 1916 was not only depressing, it was boring. It seemed wrong to complain of boredom when men were dying, but really, if you were middle-class, young, and female, there was just nothing at all to do in wartime. Evening parties were composed of young girls and their middle-aged parents, with an occasional officer on leave from his regiment to leaven the heavy company. During the daytime they fetched the little boys from school, sewed, wrote letters, and attended—along with Kati—the charity and wartime societies where they met everyone they had met the day before and would probably meet the day after. A large munitions factory had opened on the outskirts of the town and often, when they were going from one boring fund-raising meeting to the next, they passed small bands of factory girls on their way to the work shifts. They were vulgar, of course, loud and noisy, shouting the way no lady ever would, but they always seemed to be having such an enjoyable time that Malie and Eva were envious.

“They make me feel so
useless,”
Malie said one day when they had watched two factory girls in dark blue overalls and white caps throwing a
kolbasz
to each other over the head of a third girl. They were screaming with laughter, jostling, and pushing in the warm May sunshine until a loud high-pitched whistle from the factory made them drop the sausage and race towards the gates.

Malie and Eva stood on the pavement in their deep-brimmed hats trimmed with flowers and ribbons, their white gloves, parasols, and bags of wool (it was knitting-for-soldiers day) clutched in their hands, and the boredom of nearly two years of war washed over them.

“So useless,” Malie said again. “I wish we could go out and do something!”

“I wish Felix would write to me,” said Eva irrationally, not understanding why Felix’s refusal to write made the boredom worse but just knowing that it was so.

“Oh, Eva!”

Amalia was sorry for her sister, sympathetic to her devotion to a man who was unresponsive, but surely her gloom and misery were out of all proportion to any expectations she might have had. She had danced with him at a few balls. They had gone on picnics together, had laughed and flirted a little, and that was all. Eva’s two years of bad temper and sulks were surely not caused solely by unrequited love?

“Why do you keep fretting about Felix?” Malie asked her sister. “Last week you received seven letters from the front, three of them from Andras, who wants you to marry him, and two from the Pecsi boy, who is longing for a little encouragement. Why do you still brood over Felix?”

“You don’t understand,” said Eva moodily. She kicked at the
kolbasz,
lying abandoned on the cobblestones. “I’m
different
from you, Amalia.” The use of Malie’s full name indicated that Eva was feeling superior. “I’m more... more sensitive than you. I see things more clearly. I have greater... greater desires. Yes, that’s the difference between us. I’m more intense and imaginative than you, and I need better things than you. You’re contented with nothing. I need more from life than that!”

Malie had stopped walking. She turned and stared, stony-faced, at her sister.

“What do you mean?” she asked in ominous tones. “What do you mean, contented with nothing?”

“Oh, I’m not saying anything about Karoly,” Eva went on hastily, slightly bothered by her own carelessness. “I mean he’s wonderful and handsome and everything. And I think he’s just right for
you,
Malie. But you see, I’ve decided that Felix Kaldy is the only man suitable for me. I want more than you!”

Amalia’s lips pressed into a tight line. Then she spun round and began walking briskly back home again. “I see,” she said crisply, and, “I hope you get what you want, Eva.”

Later, when Malie was still continuing to be very quiet and detached, Eva wondered if perhaps she had been rude. But really! It was time Malie understood how tired they all were of this dreary constant devotion to Karoly. And she had only said what was true; everyone knew the Vilaghys were inferior to the Kaldys. But the tiny grain of guilt persisted in her heart. She began to feel bad about hurting Malie—if she had hurt her. She didn’t like the way Malie continued to be so distant and reserved. It wasn’t as though she had said anything dreadful; she had only pointed out the difference between them.