Csardas (55 page)

She could give no answer and, indeed, she was too ashamed to answer—ashamed because she was so very loved, by her husband, her sons, her sister, brothers, and parents. And Kati had never been loved by anyone.

“Can I see her today?”

Kati shrugged. Her shoulders were slumped in exhaustion and she sat badly, the way a woman sits when she is too tired to care about being graceful.

“Go in. She was sleeping just now. Don’t wake her.”

Aunt Gizi’s room was hot, the air sickly with disinfectant and medicaments. She lay, her arms outside the covers, with her face dropped in, like a skull. She wasn’t asleep and her eyes followed Malie across the room.

“Hello, Aunt Gizi,” she whispered, dropping a kiss on the emaciated cheek.

Aunt Gizi stared.

“Are you feeling a little better?”

It was eerie to see Aunt Gizi, sharp, snappy, astringent Aunt Gizi, lying helpless and disinterested, waiting to die.

“Kati will be along soon,” she said The lids over Aunt Gizi’s eyes lowered and raised again.

“Look after Kati,” she croaked. “She only has you, only the Ferencs. Look after Kati.”

Ice ran down her spine. She longed to feel pity or affection for Aunt Gizi, but there was something macabre about this cold, dying creature that repelled her.

“I made a mistake,” whispered Gizi. “It was a bad marriage.” Her eyes closed and she drifted away. Malie, with relief, started to leave the room, but suddenly Aunt Gizi’s eyes opened again. “Eva too,” she continued, “a mistake, a bad mistake. You were the best, Malie. You married the way we all should have done....” The whisper trailed away and she could hear the sudden noise in Aunt Gizi’s chest, a quick, heavy breathing. “Where’s my brother?” she rasped. “I want to see my brother.”

Malie fled. Outside she told Kati that her mother was worse, much worse, and they had better send for the doctor and get Alfred into the bedroom too. Then she sent one of the servants for her papa; he had been coming every day to see poor Gizi but Gizi had never specifically asked for him before. By the time he arrived Alfred was blubbering all over the library with his arm clutched round a bottle of brandy. The doctor was in Aunt Gizi’s bedroom and Papa waited until he came out and then spoke to him about Alfred.

“You had better give him a sedative or something,” he said sternly. “My brother-in-law is unable to control himself in the sick-room, and he is upsetting my sister and her daughter. Can you do something to quieten him?”

The doctor nodded and disappeared into the library. Papa waited for a second and then went in to his sister. The breathing was even sharper and faster. Amalia watched her father take Aunt Gizi’s hand in his and bend over the pillow.

“Gizi.”

He said a few words that she did not understand, and suddenly she was back in the bedroom with the old man dying and herself only a child.

“Gizi?”

Aunt Gizi opened her eyes and tried to smile at Papa, and Malie saw that Kati had been wrong about one thing. Aunt Gizi had loved someone in her life; she had loved the brother who had trodden the same harsh path to success that she had.

The two hands clasped against the coverlet tightened against each other, and then Gizi’s slender fingers went slack, the rasping stopped, and Papa turned away from the bed.

After the funeral Kati made no attempt to go home, back to the manor and Felix. She sent a message saying that her papa needed her and she would be up in the country with him during the summer and would visit her husband and mother-in-law then.

She spent the summer at the Racs-Rassay villa and went “home” only once, to collect her paints. She left her clothes and the expensive wedding presents that had flowed from all parts of the county. On social occasions she met her husband and Madame Kaldy with dignified cordiality. Madame Kaldy did not seem too happy with the arrangement, or rather she did not seem happy with Kati’s composure and disinterest. She tried to speak to Alfred Racs-Rassay, intending to ask him if some compromise could be arrived at where Kati spent at least some time being a dutiful wife. Alfred and she had come to a very fair arrangement once before and the result was the restoration of the Kaldy estate and an aristocratic husband for his daughter. Something could surely be agreed upon again. But Alfred, the widower, was not the same man as Alfred, the man of affairs and business. He was now permanently drunk and bloated with too much food. His hands shook all the time she was talking to him and he kept saying, “I agree, my dear Luiza, I agree,” without having the slightest idea of what she was saying.

She finally had to tackle Kati herself and was chagrined to discover that Kati, although still quiet and respectful, was no longer the docile creature who had come to the manor as a bride.

“I cannot come home, mother-in-law,” she stated flatly. “As you can see, my papa needs me. Felix is quite happy with you and his horses. I see no necessity at all for me to hurry home.”

Madame Kaldy fidgeted. “A wife’s place is with her husband,” she said sanctimoniously. “Your dear mama would have agreed with me, I know. When she was ill it was different—a special need—but your papa is just drinking because he feels sorry for himself. Your place is with your husband, not your father.”

“I cannot leave him.” Kati’s voice was without expression, and she stared blankly at her mother-in-law. Madame Kaldy fidgeted again.

“You should come home,” she urged. “You are, what, thirty-one now? And no sign of children. And how will there be if you do not come home?”

Kati stared again, coolly, almost pityingly. Without knowing why, Madame Kaldy flushed. She knew there was something wrong between her son and Kati, they did not behave as other married couples behaved, but she blamed Kati for that. Look how devoted he had been to Eva. There was nothing wrong with her son, for with Eva he had behaved just like any other young man. It was all Kati’s fault. She made no attempt to be pretty or vivacious. How could she capture a man as sensitive and fastidious as Felix when she never even tried to be feminine? Sometimes she wondered if perhaps she should have let him marry Eva Ferenc after all. Then there would have been an heir but no estate. She sighed. How difficult and complicated it all was.

“You need not worry about an heir, mother-in-law.” Kati smiled. “Eva will give you all the heirs you need.”

Eva, this summer, had announced smugly that she was pregnant again. She seemed to have settled into marriage at last and was overheard to say that she hoped this child would be a boy as she “owed it to Adam.” Madame Kaldy didn’t understand that remark either and it made her uncomfortable. What did she mean, owed it to Adam? When questioned, Eva had flushed and mumbled that she had remained childless for five years before Terez was born, so she thought she ought to hurry up now. It all seemed strange, and Madame Kaldy didn’t like it

“So you won’t come home?” she pressed.

Kati smiled politely and shook her head.

“When will you come home?”

“When Papa is better.”

And, frustrated, Madame Kaldy had to be content with that.

It seemed that her problem might quickly be solved that winter, for just before Christmas Alfred stepped out of bed one morning and dropped dead on the floor. No one was really too surprised. He had become enormous and dropsical and a post-mortem revealed that, although he had died of a heart attack, he also had cirrhosis of the liver. Kati, wooden-faced and dry-eyed, followed the coffin of her parent to the Racs-Rassay tomb for the second time in a year. After the funeral Malie invited her to come and stay in Budapest for as long as she liked, and Kati, for the first time in months, showed a little warmth and enthusiasm.

“Oh, Malie, could I?”

“Of course, darling! You know we love to have you. The boys adore you, and you can see your artist friend again. Dominic, wasn’t it?”

“I shan’t stay for long. Just long enough to make arrangements to go to Vienna.”

“Vienna? Why do you want to go to Vienna? You know so very few people there.”

Kati suddenly leaned forward and took Malie’s hands in hers. “Malie. I haven’t told anyone yet, but I’m going to live in Vienna. I’m never going back to Madame Kaldy or Felix. I’m going to live in Vienna, and maybe I shall study painting, or maybe I’ll just live like a lady with servants and a carriage. But I’m never, never going to do what anyone tells me again.” She shook her head. “I’m never going to allow myself to be in a position where people
can
tell me what to do. I’m free, Malie! For the first time in my life, I’m free!”

Malie, about to ask how Kati was going to live, stopped, realizing suddenly that Kati was an extremely rich young woman. She owned a house in the town, a villa up in the hills, and any number of interests in various factories and coal mines.

But Kati... all alone in Vienna?

“You shouldn’t go and live alone, Kati. Not now, not after this year with your mama and papa dying. If you want to leave Felix—”

“I do... and have.”

“Then come and stay with us. You can study painting if you wish, and meet our friends. You can do everything in Budapest that you can do in Vienna.”

Kati smiled, the old Kati smile that was shy and timid and grateful. “I’ll come for a little while, but I’m tired of being ‘poor Cousin Kati,’ and that’s what I’ll always be if I stay forever in the family.” She clasped her hands together and closed her eyes. “I’ll never know what I could be unless I go away, where no one knows me, where no one is sorry for me. I want—I want to be a
person,
Malie, a real person. Don’t you understand?”

She understood, and she promised to take the letter to Madame Kaldy and answer the questions that would ensue. It would all be arranged very discreetly. It would be announced that after nursing two parents Kati’s own health was in jeopardy and she was going to a convalescent hospital in the Austrian Alps. Eventually people in the county would realize that she was not coming back.

Malie, who knew more of Kati’s marriage than anyone else, privately decided it was more than either Felix or his mother deserved.

In 1929, just as Jozsef completed his courses in Berlin, Leo set out for that vibrant and urbane metropolis. Their studies should have overlapped by a year, but Leo, cursed with the weak chest of his boyhood, had been forced to spend another winter up in the hills with Eva and Adam. Now, pronounced cured, finally and completely, he set off to meet his brother in Berlin. They had arranged it so that, before Jozsef finally left, Leo would spend two weeks settling in Jozsef’s apartment and being generally eased into Berlin life by his experienced elder brother.

The girls in Berlin were slim and lovely. French, English, American accents could be heard in the restaurants and bars, and Leo nervously, but with admiration, watched Jozsef’s easy camaraderie with the crop-haired young women and their noisy companions. Jozsef had filled out into a square-shouldered, heavily built young man. He looked a little like Papa but had none of Papa’s sternness and rigidity. On the contrary, his face had already become a little full round the jowls from German beers. He seemed to know everyone by name and was constantly calling across to people. “Hi, Lisette, Gunther! Come and meet my little brother from Budapest. He can speak four languages fluently. What do you think of that?” One of the slim, bright young girls came over and kissed Jozsef, leaving a bloody smear of lipstick over his mouth and chin. Leo blushed, but the blush didn’t signify disapproval, only envy and a certain degree of erotic sympathy in his own body.

“Hey, Jozsef, look at your little brother! He’s blushing. Who would expect a Hungarian to blush because he sees a girl kissing a man!”

Jozsef laughed and answered in some Berliner slang that Leo did not understand. He was, as Jozsef had said, fluent in four languages, but this was a quick-fire colloquialism that he couldn’t grasp. He wondered if he would ever have the temerity to kiss a girl in a public restaurant.

Later, in the apartment on Savigny Platz, he tried to question his brother on the subject of women.

“It’s been difficult for me, Jozsef,” he said earnestly. “You know what it’s like at home, Papa knowing everyone in the town, and up in the hills it’s worse, all the girls full of county pedigrees and looking for husbands. And the peasants—I don’t think I could with the peasants.” How to explain that while he found some of the peasant girls smooth and brown and pretty, he couldn’t bring himself to ask favours of them, even though many of his schoolmates had: On the rare occasions when his desire had been roused by a farm girl, the fear and the humility in her brown eyes had killed his overtures.

Jozsef opened the bottle of brandy that Leo had brought from home. He sat down on the opposite side of the table and poured two glasses.

“It’s easy in Berlin,” he said expansively. “You can go out and buy a girl if you want. No one to spy on you or report back. You must be careful about making sure she’s clean, though. A fellow in my second year had to leave the university and go home for medical treatment. His father made no end of a row about it.”

“I don’t think I’d like to buy a woman,” said Leo, although a faint surge of excitement caught him at the
idea
of such an arrangement.

Jozsef preened himself a little. “No. Well, I’ve never had to do it—buy a woman. There was a girl last summer. That’s why I didn’t come home for the vacation. She came and stayed here with me for three months. Did all the cooking and washing too. She was crazy about me. Said she’d never known anyone like me in her whole life.”

“What happened to her?” asked Leo, fascinated.

Jozsef looked crestfallen. “She went back to Frankfurt when my allowance ran out,” he explained. “She couldn’t be bought you understand, but she had to have something to live on and I’d used all my money up. I couldn’t write to Papa for any more.”

It seemed incredible, exciting and tremendously cosmopolitan. To think that his own brother had lived here, in this apartment, with a ravishing creature whom he could possess whenever he wanted. A kaleidoscope of fantastic images chased themselves through his head: Jozsef and the girl in bed, on the bed, under the table, in the bath, on the floor in front of the stove.... Sweat broke out on his forehead.