Csardas (32 page)

“I can just as easily be killed here as with Uncle Sandor,” she stated. “And anyway, why shouldn’t I go? I shall be safer than Malie is when she goes out walking on her own!” That had provoked a fresh outburst because no one had known that Malie went out of the house early every morning and walked alone in the forest. Eva, watching through half-closed sleepy eyes, had seen her steal quietly from the room and vanish into the morning gloom.

“I just walk,” said Malie quietly. “Just walk to be alone.” “Well, I want to go out and see people,” Eva grumbled. “Even Aunt Gizi and Kati are better than no one at all. I’m tired of not seeing anyone.” She wrapped a shawl round her head and the boys, bored also and seizing a chance of freedom, begged to go too. Finally they set off, the four of them. How good it was to be out, trotting through the snow, the trees, feeling the crisp air and feeling also a slight tingle of fear that something might unexpectedly happen.

At the Racs-Rassay villa they were all so pleased to see her that she felt like a heroine, plunging through the snow to collect provisions for her family. She talked and listened and allowed Uncle Alfred to spoil her a little. Then she hurried home with all the news.

“Uncle Alfred is actually working with the animals! Can you believe that! And Aunt Gizi is helping too. They will come to see us soon. And Kati is learning to cook—she is thinner and even uglier, poor Kati—and, ah, yes, Kati told me that Madame Kaldy is all alone in her house, just a couple of old peasant women with her. And she is looking just like her old peasants, milking the cows with them and milling grain and baking bread. Uncle Alfred invited her to stay at the villa with them, and she was quite rude. She said she would stay to welcome home her sons! Fancy, Mama, that is exactly what Roza said!”

“Poor woman.” Malie’s voice was quiet. She was looking out of the window at the snow. “She has two sons to pray for, to worry about, to cry for. She does not know if they will come back. Even Felix is not necessarily safe in Budapest.”

“Nothing can happen to Felix,” said Eva emphatically. “Felix will be safe.” She wasn’t always very good at judging people, at knowing what they would do or how they would react. But she knew, beyond all doubt, that Felix would come safely home. All through the summer, every time he had come from Budapest, they had spent hours together, walking, playing the piano, drinking bad coffee, talking, and during that time Eva had begun to know the real Felix. And because she knew him she also knew he would come home safely.

“You cannot be sure, Eva, no one is ever sure. We think the danger is past and then—” Malie’s face was sad and Eva did not want to look at it. Their positions had been reversed. Now Malie had no one, while she, Eva, was bound to Felix by ties of confession and need and reliance. Felix was hers at last.

“Perhaps we should go to see her, Eva. Madame Kaldy. Perhaps we should go
.”

“I don’t want to go!” She didn’t want to face Madame Kaldy at the present time. She wasn’t sure why. It was something to do with all the hours she had spent with Felix this summer, all those hours and all the things, the bad, horrible things they never spoke of.

“It would be kind, Eva.”

Eva turned away and began to unwind her shawl. “I don’t want to be kind to Madame Kaldy. She is spiteful and patronizing, and I don’t want to spend my time with her. I don’t like her.”

“Then I shall go.”

Eva shrugged. “Go if you like, Malie. She won’t be pleased to see you. Remember the time we walked over there in the hot sun and she was quite rude and made you help her with the fruit basket.”

Malie didn’t answer. She wondered what kind of reasoning functioned in Eva’s mind. It was obvious, from the events of the past summer, that Eva had at last won Felix Kaldy. They spent a lot of time together sitting in corners, holding hands and looking unhappy. How could Eva be planning marriage with Felix when she wouldn’t even talk to his mother?

The following day she climbed into the pony cart with the boys, and Uncle Sandor turned the horse’s head in the direction of the Kaldy farm.

It was peaceful, so peaceful and quiet it was difficult to remember that these were bad times, that millions of men had died, that the old world had been torn up by its roots and nothing planted in its place. The snow was sad, the icicles on the trees, the fleeting back of a deer seen bounding away from the track, they were all sad and... finished. But there was peace too. Eight months since the news had come, eight months facing up to a life without him. She was still desolate, the pain was still there, but it had deadened a little. She sat outside the problems and turmoils of those around her, watching as a disinterested stranger might watch, knowing that their emotions, their joys and pains, would not—could not—touch her any more. She was free from involvement. And now, sometimes, she took melancholy pleasure from things unconnected with people: from the deer bounding through the forest, from the snow covering the trees, from the horse’s breath steaming in the cold air.

“There’s a soldier in front of us,” said Jozsef quietly. He was almost twelve and understood some of the ramifications of the present situation. Soldiers were no longer gallant saviours of the Empire. They were unstable men who might possibly be dangerous. Uncle Sandor grunted and put his hand reassuringly on the rifle beside him.

“Only one soldier,” he growled. “Nothing to fear.”

But the soldier’s behaviour was unnatural. He had been walking very slowly ahead of them, with his pack slung over one shoulder and his head bowed low. As they grew closer to him he suddenly stopped. He didn’t look round at them, the way he would if he had been begging a ride. He just stood quite still at the edge of the wood, looking ahead at the fields. His pack slid to the ground and he didn’t stoop to pick it up. Malie put her arms round the boys and gripped them to her. “Just take no notice of him,” she whispered. “We shall go straight past and pretend we have not seen him.”

Uncle Sandor flicked Sultan very lightly with the whip and the old horse moved a little faster. Staring straight ahead they drove past and only at the last moment, drawn by curiosity, did Malie glance swiftly at the motionless figure.

She couldn’t believe it, but it was Adam, Adam Kaldy with a torn uniform and no coat, Adam Kaldy with boots split down to the soles and paper packed in the sides, Adam Kaldy standing, just standing, staring at his land, with runnels of tears flowing unchecked over his bearded face.

Things settled a little. There was law and order of some sort but the future was uncertain. The enemy—only now they were no longer the enemy but the victors—had still to decide what punishment should be meted out to the defeated. There was no king. Hungary was a republic. Some frightening innovations were about to take place.

She sat, the “old witch,” her hands idle in her lap, staring out at the snow and ice of a bitterly cold February. Was it colder than usual? Or was it just that now there was no coal and they had to be careful with the wood? Or was it the death of her dreams that made this February colder than any other?

A lifetime spent rebuilding an estate, planning, scheming, gaining a reputation for meanness and sharpness, all so that one day she could leave her son in possession of the land his father had frittered away. Economies, humiliating work, begging from rich relatives for help in educating her children, all so that bit by bit, piece by piece, she could buy back the land, rebuild the Kaldy heritage, and now—with much of her ambition realized—it all threatened to vanish. Count Karolyi was running the country and he had promised the people land. He had promised to start with his own land—all to be given to the people—and, after his, everyone else’s land would go into the same destructive abyss.

All this land—hers! Hers by her toil and misery and hate, hers to give to whomsoever she pleased!—all this would be split among the peasantry, the scum she had chased and harried for so many years, the men and women who had cheated her and idled on her land. Now it would be given away to the stupid, the poor, the lazy.

She had tried, just once, to talk to Adam about it, to relieve the welter of bitter burnt-out hope that was corroding her heart. But Adam was silent, going about his tasks, watering and feeding the cattle with whatever fodder he could beg or borrow, mending the barns and grooming their one remaining horse. Adam was a recluse. He wouldn’t talk about anything.

And, in any case, what use was it to talk? She had never shared her problems, never asked for help (unless it was to further her plans of re-establishment), never wept helplessly (as that stupid Bogozy woman was prone to do) when things were not going well. It did no good to talk. Keep your secrets; worry them out yourself; let no one know what you are doing or why.

And so she sat and brooded and hated—hated the Bolsheviks who had begun the disease, hated the Austrians who had led them into a war and then lost it, hated Count Karolyi who deemed himself a saviour of the poor, hated her husband who had squandered his birthright. She had been so close to completion. Just the manor house and a large track of forest and it would all have been hers again—hers to give to Felix.

The manor; she had never looked at it again since the day she left twenty-five years ago. She had handed the keys to the bailiff, climbed into the hired coach with her two small sons, and ridden away without looking back. But every feature of the house that had been her home for five years was ingrained on her soul; every room, every mosaic floor, every painted fragment of ceiling and walls, every chandelier, tapestry, and door was catalogued in her mind. And now, nothing. They would lose it too, the bourgeois who had bought it from her, the bourgeois who had nothing to commend them except the money they possessed.

As the February days iced to a close her brooding took an illogical twist. She did not understand why, but the desire grew to go once more and see the manor—see it before it was irrevocably lost to her. It was an hour away, at the far end of the estate she had slowly bought back, and between their farm and the old house was the river and the land she rented out (at a very high rate) to tenants. The wish grew, and as it grew so her despair retreated and a thin flame—of chance? hope?—glimmered in her mind. She wanted to see the manor. Why? Because even now she had not given up. Even now there might be a way. She could not fight an entire government—a law, a new decree, no—but why not take a chance? Throw everything on one last speculation. What could she lose? Her land? Karolyi and his Communists would take that away from her anyway. And governments changed; wars broke out again; times were still unsettled, restless.

She turned in her sleep at night, fretting, brooding, wondering if her courage was failing because she was growing old. And finally, knowing that if she revisited the old house it would prompt her to action, she took the horse and trap and, refusing Adam’s offer to accompany her, drove along a road she had not travelled for twenty-five years.

The farms were just like any farms at this time, cold, snowy, lacking animals and men. But they could be good again! Imagine the estate owned entirely by Felix, with Adam superintending a huge staff of drovers and shepherds and labourers, all working to unite the Kaldy lands in one profitable, money-making venture.

The idea that had lain dormant for so many weeks took a little more shape, a little more fire in her heart. As she grew near the old house she began to feel excitement mounting, a wild, gay, exhilarated excitement, the excitement of a young girl going to meet her lover.

It was there, shabby because of the war but otherwise just the same, standing on a rise of grassland, a line of birch trees biding one side of the lower storey—they had grown so tall!—the colonnaded porch peeling a little, but the roof was good. Yes, she could see there was nothing wrong with the roof.

The trap came to a halt and she stared, devouring the jewel in her crown of rehabilitation. There were huge stables at the back; Felix could have as many horses as he wished. And parties and balls; the big doors could be thrown open and the music would echo over the gardens, through the trees, and down to the ornamental lake.

She had dreaded that perhaps the bourgeois had changed things. So many of them did, throwing on a wing here or converting a stable into a garage if they wished to indulge in a motorcar. But this particular bourgeois, a cloth manufacturer who had invested with great wisdom, had left things as they were.

She sat unheeding of the cold, or the time, and then she saw a nervous face at one of the downstairs windows. Erdei! That was their name. And the old man was still alive, and so was she, and now she had a proposition to make to old man Erdei, the cloth manufacturer, the bourgeois who had lived in her house for too long.

She tied the reins to the seat and climbed down from the cart. She moved lithely, like a girl again, as she stepped daintily onto the terrace and walked towards the door.

It took only an hour—an hour of incredulity, shock, and finally acceptance on old Erdei’s part, and of nerve on hers. She was shaking when she came out of the house and stepped up on the cart; her hands were trembling and there was an uneasy palpitation around her heart. She wasn’t a young girl, she was an old woman, and the years of strain, culminating in this one last throw, were making her aware of her frailty. She wished she could go back to the farmhouse—she never thought of that utilitarian place as home—and rest for a while in her room. But the day’s tasks were not over yet. Now she had to visit Alfred Racs-Rassay.

She’d known them all in the old days, of course; the Racs-Rassay, the Bogozy, all of them. Alfred had not been married then and his father had still been alive. She had danced and drunk and hunted with them, before her world had smashed to pieces.

She saw them sometimes even now—Alfred, who had grown even sillier and weaker with the years, and Gizi, whom she secretly admired, and their ugly little daughter. She saw them and they were polite to one another. And now she was going to make a proposition to Alfred Racs-Rassay....

The afternoon was growing dusky when she arrived at their villa, and her tiredness nearly overwhelmed her. But she braced herself, and the old servant woman took her in and left her in Alfred’s study. She sat in a leather chair and closed her eyes, trying to recuperate her wits and strength, and then she heard the door open and Alfred came in. He was surprised. She never paid social visits.