Csardas (31 page)

“Nearly at the top.”

Kovacs’s belly rumbled. His face had the bluish tinge common to people with gastric ulcers. “Any food, Lieutenant? My ulcer—”

“I have none.” In his knapsack he had half a sausage and a piece of black bread but he knew they were going to need it later more than they did now. Also Kovacs complained before he needed to. His ulcer wasn’t as bad as he pretended. The boy didn’t complain at all.

At the ridge they paused for breath. Kovacs collapsed on a rock and slumped over. Nemeth stood, relaxed and still. He and Adam had discovered in two and a half years that it was better not to sit after you had climbed. One rested standing, and the muscles didn’t have time to slacken again.

To the north, in the distance, the peaks were covered in snow. The sun shone up here, but even though they weren’t very high there was a thin mist just below them. It blocked out the valley in front and, mercifully, the valley behind. Shellfire reverberated round the hills.

“Now. It is time to go. We must hurry. The next ridge isn’t so high and behind that we are at the command post.”

Down, easier this side, quite fast. The boy was still nervous but high spirits and an incline made him hop and run, career a little, like a child. Adam almost expected him to throw his arms wide as he ran and whoop with excitement.

In the valley it was raining, a fine drizzle that gradually soaked everything. They forded a couple of streams and then began to climb again. It was midday and he called another halt and this time took the sausage and bread from his pack. Kovacs gazed at him reproachfully as he took his two slices.

“Keep some if you can, Kovacs. It may be a long time before we get more.”

Kovacs ate it all; so did the boy. He and Nemeth divided their tiny portions yet again, ate half, and put the rest in their packs. The shellfire was growing louder and, to the south, they could hear the rapping of a machine-gun.

Over the second ridge and then, coming a little way behind them from higher up, five infantrymen, two of them without boots, their feet bleeding on the rocky ground.

They were too weary, all of them, to talk to one another. The infantrymen just fell in behind and they stumbled down the mountain.

The village, the hut where the post was supposed to be, was deserted. Inside the hut a table with a plate and cup, in the corner a heap of ash with some papers not quite properly burnt through, a map hanging from one pin on the wall, and for the rest, nothing.

Two more infantrymen joined them, from the south end of the valley, torn uniforms, thin dirty faces, one without a rifle.

“What has happened?”

“What has happened,” said Adam soberly, “is that the retreat is no longer being ordered. We must just go, the best way we can.”

“Can’t we rest?” grumbled Kovacs.

“If you wish. I estimate the Italians and English are three or four hours behind us.”

He stepped straight out of the hut and didn’t even bother to give an order. All the men fell in behind, and as quickly as their tired bodies and sore feet would allow, they began to walk back to Austria.

They were just ahead of the enemy. The next day a stranded hussar told them that the town of Vittorio Veneto had fallen but they didn’t really need to be told. They could hear the gunfire and see the pall of smoke in the sky behind them. The hussar also told them that it was thirty miles to a railway line. Their faces numb with apathy and fatigue, none of them answered, and he rode away in the direction of home.

The track broadened into a country road and the soldiers multiplied, a great line of dirty, silent figures trudging away from the distant shellfire. Sometimes their lethargy was interrupted by shouting and the hooting of a staff vehicle. Silently they opened to let a car go through, then closed again.

Despair... despair. When had he known the war was lost? Finally and irrevocably when he saw the English tanks, but long before that in actuality, in the spring when the recruits and supplies ceased to come for the simple reason that there were no more men and no more supplies. Through a tired, bitter summer’s fighting and an autumn’s retreat, he had known that the war was lost. Perhaps he had known even earlier, in Russia when their soldiers had deserted, and perhaps he had even known when he went to the garrison four years ago, leaving a good crop of sugar beet to go to seed.

He tried never to think about what he was doing, what great schemes he was part of. He was a farmer, he liked to see blossoming and fruiting, and if he thought about the rape of the land—the land of a whole continent—he knew he would lie down in a ditch and let the rain wash over him and never get up again.

Because he was a farmer he tried to accept the huge catastrophe about him in the same way that he had to accept cattle sickness or crop failure or the burning of a barn. One must not rail against God, or fate, or whatever it was that decreed natural disaster. No, one must not rage in impotence; one must tackle the small area close around: segregate the sick cattle, use the wasted corn as compost and buy seed for next year, rebuild the barn. And he had tried to treat the war in the same way. He had men to lead and a gun to guard. He had tried to keep his men alive. He had tried to stop his gun from being captured or blown up. In neither had he succeeded, and now he was reduced to three men—everyone else dead, dying, in hospital, or invalided out, the lucky ones—and no gun. And now he did not care any more. The war was over. The natural phenomena had succeeded. Four years of waste.

When at last they hit the railway line there was a semblance of order. A bad-tempered major, his arm in a sling and his head bandaged, told them to march up the line to the next village. It was rumoured there was an engine and some rolling stock there. If they would get the engine going, and provided the Italians didn’t advance too quickly and blow up the line, they might get to Krainburg.

“After Krainburg—if you get to Krainburg—you are on your own.” The major was standing on a wooden crate beside the railway line. It was raining, and pools of dirty water lay in the ruts between the lines. The major stared at them, not seeing them, miserable, failed. “Get to your homes, any way you can. The Empire has disintegrated. No one is responsible for anyone else any more. Just get home and protect your families from whatever is about to happen.”

They heard him, and some of them were afraid, but mostly they were too tired, too hungry, too sick to care.

As he led Kovacs and Nemeth and the boy along the line he clung to one thought, one small instinct of survival that the war had not extinguished. If he could only get home to the farm, to his land, he would be all right. He would get these three men, the last of the army that he commanded, inside the frontiers of Hungary and then, his duty done—the cattle cared for, the crops in—he would fight his way back to the farm, where he could weep quietly and in peace.

It was over. Incredibly, frighteningly, the war—which only a few weeks ago hadn’t seemed to be going too badly—was over. The government, the King, the railways, the law, all was finished. The Serbs and Croats had demanded autonomy; so had the Czechs and Slovaks. Count Tisza had been shot in his own house by a group of revolutionaries, and crowds of refugees were flocking into the country away from the advancing Romanians.

There were ugly rumours from Budapest, and Papa hastened up at once to see what was happening. He gave strict instructions that they were to lock the doors of the house and not unbar the gates to the courtyard. Uncle Sandor carried his gaming gun with him in the yard, and the servants huddled together nervously in the kitchen. (Afterwards they learned that Papa had waited for nine hours at the station. There were no trains and when, finally, one did come it was full of soldiers, undisciplined scarecrows who clung onto the sides and roof of the train. Papa had managed to find a standing place only by giving the guard several korona, and the journey, which usually took only about two hours, lasted all night.)

It was November, but if they stared out from behind the shuttered windows of the house they could see wild and hungry-looking men in tattered uniforms, walking the pavements in bare feet. There was no order, no one to tell them what to do. The world had been destroyed.

Papa finally got a message through to them. It was pushed under the door of the courtyard one morning by an unseen hand. Uncle Sandor found it when he came to sweep. It was addressed to Mama, but the instructions were for all of them.

My dear Marta,

Things are dangerous and unsettled here. Karolyi is trying to form a government, but what kind of government it will be I am afraid to guess—revolutionaries and poets, I imagine. No one knows what will be the ultimate terms of our surrender to the enemy and at the moment we are more concerned with the disorder in the city. I am sleeping at the bank with some of the so-called Civic Guard defending us. I want you and the children to go up to the farm with Uncle Sandor. You will be safer in the country; Gizi and Alfred were wise to stay on at the end of the summer. Alfred will help you once you are up there and our own peasants who know us will protect you from the bands of killers who are plundering and looting. Go early in the morning in the big coach and wear your oldest and shabbiest clothes. Stay there until I come.

Zsigmond

And so they had done exactly what he ordered. Locking the house behind them, they had started out very early one morning when the streets were empty and the dawn was just breaking. Sleepy and cold they huddled together in miserable silence. Even the boys were not cheered by the thought of an unofficial winter visit to the farm. They did not understand the full implication of the journey but the general fear and gloom penetrated their youthful indifference.

“Malie,” Leo asked after an hour’s silence, “will losing the war make any difference to us? Will we have to go away from Hungary and the farm?”

Malie’s nose was red about the edge of her scarf. She wanted to comfort Leo the way she had comforted him all his life, but what could she say? She hugged him and re-wrapped a blanket round his legs, but she couldn’t assure him of the future.

Halfway to the farm Uncle Sandor was stopped and they all held their breath, frightened in case their luggage was about to be stolen, the coach attacked. But it was only a soldier trying to get home and begging a lift. Sandor, after a moment’s hesitation, took him onto the box and they all fell silent again.

As they neared the hills patches of thin snow appeared on the ground, and finally, when they entered the acacia woods, the track was covered. The trees looked pretty, delicately festooned in white, and for a moment the reason for their arrival was forgotten.

“Oh, how pretty!” cried Mama, clapping her hands together. “Look boys, see how pretty the snow is!”

“Can we sleigh, Mama? Can we come out and play? Uncle Sandor and Sultan could take us out in the sleigh.”

“Why, yes.” And then they all remembered, remembered the war and the uncertainty, and the fear of things that might or might not happen.

The farm was silent, covered in a pall of snow with just a small area cleared round Roza’s kitchen entrance. A dog barked from inside but there were no other sounds, no cackling of hens, no plaintive cries from the cattle, nothing. Roza’s face, white, guarded, peered through the slightly opened door.

“Madame! Oh, madame! You have come to help poor Roza!”

She staggered forward through the snow and flung her arms round Mama, then kissed and hugged them all. Roza was even smaller now, thin and wizened, her black eyes sunk deep into her skull.

The kitchen was warm. There was still wood to burn and the stove was hot and welcoming. Roza put a tiny spoonful of coffee into the pot and poured on water for all of them. “There is no cream,” she apologized. “The cows have gone to your uncle’s villa. He still has a man to care for them and protect them. He sends a little milk to me once a week.”

“Where are the chickens, the geese, the ducks?”

Roza’s eyes filled with tired tears. She wasn’t really unhappy, just relieved that now she had someone to talk to and confide in. “All gone.” She shrugged. “Some soldiers came—not from this district—a band of them. They demanded food, banged on my door but I would not answer. And so they took the poultry, and the grain and potatoes from the barn, whatever was there. We still have a little grain left here, inside the house, but we have no eggs.”

“But Roza, why did you stay here alone? Why did you not go down to the village, to your sister, or over to the Racs-Rassay house? Aunt Gizi would have been pleased to use you.”

Roza stuck her hands inside the sleeves of her black woollen blouse. Her dark eyes, dumb, patient, long-suffering, gazed into Malie’s.

“I shall remain here, for as long as the master says I may. My sons—where else would they come when they return from the war? My sons, all I have, I must be here for them.” She nodded slowly. “I shall stay here. And now—now I have my young ladies to help me and my two small mountain devils to curse.” She smiled at the boys, revealing broken teeth and sunken gums. How had that happened? Roza had always had such strong white teeth.

They tried to settle in the farmhouse, but it was cold and there was not enough wood to heat all the rooms. Finally they lived in the kitchen and used the rooms immediately above— the drawing-room and Papa’s study—as places to sleep in. They were warmer than the other rooms.

They sent Uncle Sandor over to Alfred and Gizi’s and he came back with milk and eggs and bread. Somehow Alfred had managed to keep more servants than anyone else. He promised to send them whatever they needed. He offered them shelter under his roof, but the Ferencs had been hit by the same animal homing instinct as everyone else. Whatever had to be faced would be better faced there.

Once, from the direction of the village, they heard shooting and then a scream. Roza bolted the door and they all remained very quiet. The distant shouting died away and then it was still again.

They grew tired, tired of waiting, of doing very little, of watching the snow drop from the acacia trees and then come down and cover them again. One morning Eva said she would drive with Uncle Sandor to collect the milk and eggs from Uncle Alfred. Roza protested, Mama and Malie tried to deter her, but Eva was bored and fractious.