Csardas (42 page)

“I can! And it was him! I tell you, Malie, it was him! You must believe me. You must do something about it. He must be punished, killed!” Colour flamed in his face and his voice was high and loud. She couldn’t quieten him and finally she went in search of Adam, a search that took longer than she expected and that ended, rather surprisingly, with the discovery of Eva—white-faced—sitting with Adam on a stone seat at the end of the garden. He came, and the questions began all over again.

“How can you be sure, Leo?”

“I am sure.”

Adam turned to Malie, then to Eva. “Could either of you identify the man? Could your mama? Could Jozsef?”

“No. None of us could. That day was so confusing, so terrible. Everyone—anyone could have killed him. I don’t know how Leo can be so sure.”

“I am sure.”

“Very well. Let us try and find the man, but discreetly and quietly. Remember this is a wedding, Leo. Your father and your Uncle Alfred will be very angry indeed if you make scenes or unpleasantness.”

“Yes, Adam.” He was more subdued now. The grown-ups, with all their authority and common sense, had taken over and he was suddenly a little frightened of the results of his declaration. His heart was thumping and he couldn’t understand Jozsef’s exhilaration in the search for the drunken peasant.

“We’re going peasant hunting, peasant hunting,” chanted Jozsef, and Leo felt sick.

“Shut up,” he hissed.

Jozsef looked hurt. “I’m only trying to help,” came the pained reply, and Leo, once more a victim of confused emotions, turned away.

They didn’t have far to go, just through the yard of slumbering forms and round by the stables. They found him where his comrades had dropped him, pillowed on a pile of straw with the scrawny child crouched protectively by his head. “That’s him!”

He said it, but all the time he was conscious of blazing eyes, of vitriolic hatred, of fear.

“Marton,” said Adam slowly. “That’s Marton, one of my peasants. His father... his father was with me on the Russian front, right at the beginning of the war.”

“That’s him.” His confidence was faltering now. What was Adam going to do? What would happen to the man? What would happen to the boy?

“I see. Yes.” Adam didn’t move. He stood looking down at the man, at Marton. No one seemed to notice the small boy, no one but Leo. Their eyes met and held. Leo looked away first.

Adam sighed, a tired, weary sound. Then he put his hand on Leo’s shoulder and pushed him away from the others. “Leo, you realize that you are the only one who says this man killed Uncle Sandor?”

“It’s him. I know it’s him.”

“But no one else does. It is your word against his.”

“But he is a peasant!”

Adam crouched down so that he could talk quietly to Leo. His face was only a little distance away and he looked old again, the way he had looked when he first came back from the war.

“Leo, if you are right we must call the
pandur.
And they will beat the man, Marton, in order to make him tell the truth. Do you understand, Leo?”

Leo swallowed.

“I want you to understand what you are doing.”

“What will happen? If they beat him and he tells the truth, what will happen to him?”

“They will hang him.”

Leo looked over to the pile of straw. The child was still staring at him. “Does he have any other children?”

“Yes. That boy is his eldest, Janos. He is not very old, Leo, no more than five or six. He must have been born soon after his grandfather died.” Adam had drifted away a little and was talking to himself. “He was a good man, the old Marton, nearly fifty but he came with me to Russia. A brave man.”

“His feet are bleeding.”

“Hmmm?”

“The little boy. His feet are bleeding.”

“Do you want me to call the
pandur,
Leo?”

Uncle Sandor, tell me what to do. He shot you, I’m sure he did. But if they beat him, if they hang him, the little boy will cry.

“Leo?”

The little boy—Janos—was still crouching, spitting hate, on the pile of straw, but finally the strain of scrutiny, the tension of something happening but not knowing what, broke him. He put his head down between his legs and began to cry. Marton turned his head and was sick again. Some of it went on the boy’s foot.

“No.”

“What do you mean, Leo?”

“Don’t get the
pandur.” Forgive me, Uncle Sandor. I promised I’d find him and punish him. Perhaps I will later on, when he’s bigger and I can fight him. Then I’ll punish his father.

“I don’t want them to beat him. It is him—he shot Uncle Sandor—but I don’t want... the little boy, you see. I can’t—”

Adam stared at him, his face solid, impassive, no expression at all.

“It’s all right, Leo. I understand.”

“The boy—”

“Yes, Leo. I understand. I think you have chosen the right thing to do. Uncle Sandor—would he want you to hurt the little boy?”

“No.” But all the same he felt he had betrayed the old coachman. What should he have done? What should he have done?

“Come, Leo, we’ll go back into the house now. The wedding is over and the guests will soon be leaving. We must forget all about this. Don’t mention it to anyone, eh?”

“No, Adam.”

They walked away and the others followed. Once he looked back and saw that the peasant boy had stopped crying and was watching them furtively, like a nasty little animal.

They filed back through the yard, into the garden, and up to the terrace. He was too old to cry and so he clenched his fists and pressed them into his side. The attempt to control his misery was only just successful.

To think upon something, to consider and brood over a possible course of action, is frequently the first step towards acceptance.

The thought of marrying Mr. Klein—anathema to Malie—came to be a daily game of imagination. Where would they live? What were his friends like? Did he have any family? How could she marry someone whom she still addressed as Mr. Klein? And so on. And in some way living with the speculation, considering (frequently with distaste but occasionally with levity) this particular aspect and that especial possibility, removed the shocked horror that Papa’s revelation had produced. Of course she had no intention of marrying Mr. Klein—David—but she had promised to think about it, and it was an interesting exercise to wonder what kind of marriage it would have been.

Mr. Klein—David—went back to Budapest in the autumn, and throughout the winter and spring she
thought
about the idea of marrying him. Nursing Eva through a stormy, uncertain engagement, watching Papa grow more and more worried and seeing the household economies increase, she let the thought drift through her mind. What would it be like to marry Mr. Klein? She didn’t like him, but then she didn’t dislike him either. And, even though she couldn’t bear to be married to him, there would be advantages, great advantages.

She realized how rarely now she went to the theatre or to a concert. She had so loved music and she remembered with pleasure their year at school in Vienna, the concerts and operas they had attended. She had never spoken to David Klein about music, but somehow she knew he would enjoy it as much as she did. To marry him would mean concerts, ballet, theatre: in Budapest, almost certainly in Vienna—that is if Vienna ever managed to recover from the war—and possibly even Paris or London. On other days she would reflect that perhaps it would be better
not
to travel about with him when they married; she could stay on her own and enjoy his absence.

Listening to Eva protest that her engagement was all a mistake and that she didn’t want to marry Adam Kaldy, Malie would, between making sympathetic noises, acknowledge the fact that marrying David Klein would also mean escaping from Eva’s constant emotional crises.

Watching Papa grow fretful and old she would consider how good it would be to make sure that Papa’s securities were safe, to guarantee that every summer the boys could go up to the farm.

Once, in a mood of dull cynicism, she even found herself reflecting that Mr. Klein would obviously die long before she did. However unpleasant marriage to him might be, it wouldn’t last forever.

And permeating everything was one final question: If she didn’t marry Mr. Klein or someone else (and who else was there?), what would she do for the rest of her life? What was there for girls like her and Eva to do? Out of all their friends, all the girls they had grown up with, one and one only had accepted a working post. Juli Glatz taught French in the local girl’s school, which was considered an acceptable if rather second-best occupation for a young woman. It was acceptable only because Juli was extremely plain, not very rich, and twenty-five years old. The town generally acknowledged that with the shortage of young men it was unlikely that Juli would find a husband. Poor girl, at least she showed some kind of courage in accepting her inevitable single state and settling for a “vocation” instead.

Amalia, when she wasn’t thinking about marrying Mr. Klein, thought a lot about Juli Glatz. She thought about the freedom Juli must have: her own money, the chance to mix with people in the school whom she would never have met socially. She wondered why Mama and Papa (and Aunt Gizi and Uncle Alfred too) had spent a great deal of money educating their daughters when at the end of it all they were not expected to use any of it. One day, when Eva was sobbing theatrically that the engagement to Adam Kaldy must be broken, Amalia tried to talk to her about it.

“Very well, Eva,” she said brutally (it was the second time that week Eva had made her dramatic announcement), “break the engagement. And then, as you can’t marry Felix, which is what you really want, go out to work instead—like Juli Glatz.”

“What?” Eva’s tears vanished and two patches of red appeared on her cheeks.

“You—we—don’t
have
to get married. Why should we? Lots of girls go out to work now. Look at Papa’s office. Even Papa has lady typists.”

Eva was appalled. “But they are shopkeepers’ daughters, clerks’ daughters! Don’t be ridiculous, Malie! How could we go and work as typists?”

“We couldn’t,” said Amalia bitterly. “We don’t know how to type. We can speak German and French beautifully. We have studied Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Goethe. We know a little Latin, a little English, and we can play Beethoven sonatas quite well. But we cannot type or, indeed, do anything that would enable us to go out and find employment.”

“But why should we? We were the most popular girls in the town! We still are. Remember how they called us the enchanting Ferenc girls, that summer before the war? Do you remember?”

“I remember,” Malie said softly. “Oh, yes, I remember.”

“Well, we don’t need to find employment! Oh, I know they keep saying there are too many women and not enough men, but
we
don’t need to worry about that. Not us!”

Malie stared at her sister, her pretty, capricious, stupid sister.

“Eva, don’t you ever think about the future? You don’t want to marry Adam—you say you don’t love him—so what will you do? Will you break your engagement and live with Mama and Papa for the rest of your life, just waiting, hoping that someone else will come along? Don’t you see, Eva? Why should we
have
to get married? Why is there no choice for us when even a shopkeeper’s daughter has a choice? Why can’t we go out into the world and see what exciting things might happen if we didn’t get married?”

“That’s silly,” said Eva, bored. “You know very well we shall get married. I shall marry Adam and”—her face brightened—“I shall infuriate Madame Kaldy, who hates the thought of having me in her family. She has spent her whole life keeping Felix away from me. And now I shall be related to them. She will be forced to ask me to join every single family occasion. I will be Felix’s sister-in-law and she will hate it.”

“Oh, Eva!” She gave up, knowing it would be useless to try and make Eva understand. And indeed there was no need for Eva to understand. Eva was intended for matrimony. It would make little difference to her life style. She would continue to go to parties, buy pretty clothes, meet her friends for coffee, flirt, dance, tease. Look at Mama. Mama was forty-five and still enjoying these frivolous pursuits.

Mr. Klein came for short visits, brought little gifts for the three of them, was charming, entertaining, and left as elegantly as he had come. But the visits were not quite the way they had been. There always seemed to come a moment when she and Mr. Klein were alone together, just talking, and Mr. Klein would drop his bantering, amused manner and ask her all kinds of things, forcing her to think, to voice opinions and contradict him. He wanted to know her views on Horthy, on the emerging political system, on the economic crisis, on the anti-Semitism that was taking shape. He asked very few questions about her, about her emotions or feelings, but wanted to know everything about her ideas of the world. Once, roused by a slighting remark that emphasized her ignorance of topical matters, she flared into an attack on the system that didn’t allow women to know too much about current affairs or allow them to work without the stigma of “matrimony—failed” being attached to them. Mr. Klein had listened attentively to her and then asked, “So, my dear Amalia. And if you wanted to work, if you were a man and could choose any profession, what would it be?”

And, disconcerted because she expected a defence of the matrimonial system, she had floundered around seeking to choose a living for herself and had failed to find one. She had no vocation. The years of doing nothing had enervated her and now she didn’t know what she could do.

She wasn’t aware of when her acceptance of marrying Mr. Klein occurred. They never spoke of it when they were alone together, but sometime during the year that passed between Kati’s wedding and Eva’s, the thought of marrying him became no longer an imaginary exercise but an inevitability. Without either of them speaking of it, it came to be recognized between them. No details were mentioned, no dates or feelings were dwelt upon, but they both knew that at some point Amalia Ferenc would become the wife of David Klein.