Csardas (77 page)

The figure halted, then began to hurry away from him and he rushed across the square, ignoring the waiter’s indignant cry behind him.

“Marie! It’s me, Mr. Adam! Don’t run away!”

Her stout body turned. White-faced she shook her head and whispered, “Quiet, Mr. Adam. Don’t draw attention. It is better not to be noticed in the town now.”

She was afraid. Every movement of her body, every expression of her face showed fear. He slid his hand under her arm and she flinched away from him. “Marie,” he whispered, catching the fear from her. “Where are they? Where have they gone? Did they escape?”

She shook her head. “No,” she moaned softly. “They didn’t escape, Mr. Adam. They had no warning.”

It was beginning to grow cold, and he pushed her gently across the market place in the direction of the café. “We cannot talk standing out here, Marie. Please sit down and drink coffee with me. We shall be less conspicuous.”

She was embarrassed and awkward, even in the midst of their joint misery and fear; she was still uncomfortable because she was sitting in a café opposite Mr. Adam as though she were his equal. Her plump, work-stained hands clutched at her bag. She sat upright on the chair, her large feet in shabby but well-polished flat shoes placed tightly together.

“There’s nothing to be done now, Mr. Adam,” she said simply. Her eyes filled with tears and she brushed them quickly away. “What about Miss Eva and the children?”

“They’ve gone away. I can’t tell you more than that. I’ve sent them away.”

“That’s good, Mr. Adam. That’s good and sensible.”

It was the first time in his life he had ever really looked at Marie. She’d always been there, just a servant, but when had she grown old? When had the round-cheeked peasant girl become fat and middle-aged? And what would happen to her now?

“What happened, Marie? Tell me. Perhaps I can do something even now.”

“Two days ago. Just a banging on the door and—” She swallowed, and the swollen hands twisted on the handbag. “Two Germans, Gestapo, and four Arrow Cross men. They had a truck and guns. They pushed past me.” Her face was yellow and her chin was trembling. “They took them away. They were allowed to put on their coats and pack a small bag.”

A groan escaped from her lips and she hurriedly pressed her hand to her mouth.

“Just as they were climbing into the truck one of the Arrow Cross men pushed Madame Ferenc away. ‘You’re all right,’ he said. ‘You can go back; you’re not one of them,’ and Mr. Ferenc shouted down to her to go away. ‘Stay with Adam,’ he cried. ‘Go back. You’ll be safe in the house, Marta.’”

“I see.” He felt sickness creeping into the pit of his stomach.

“She climbed up into the truck, young Mr. Jacob helping. ‘I can’t leave you now, Zsigmond,’ she said.” The old servant began to sob. “She was such a silly lady sometimes, Mr. Adam. The way she laughed—you remember? Like a young girl. It used to annoy Mr. Ferenc; it wasn’t right for an old lady to laugh like that. She laughed at Mr. Ferenc when she was trying to get into the truck. ‘I can’t leave you now, Zsigmond,’ she said. ‘I’ve stayed with you all these years. Do you think I could leave you now?’” The dark lines of flesh on her face began to quiver and blur. “Oh, Mr. Adam. I should have gone with them! I was ashamed when I saw how brave she was. I wanted to go with them but I didn’t! I stood at the door and watched them drive away! I was afraid. I wanted to be brave like she was, but I was afraid.” She covered her face with her hands and he was only able to stare at her, not offer any comfort. Everything had gone too far for comfort. There was only this terrible dread that had settled in the pit of his stomach.

“Amalia? Mr. David?”

She nodded. “Them too. There were others already in the track: the Maryks, and the doctor, and Mr. Glatz, and Miss Kati. But her son wasn’t there. I looked for him and he wasn’t there. When the truck had gone I went to Miss Kati’s house. I thought I would find the boy and take him to my sister at Szentendre. He would be safe with my sister. My sister would look after him.” She began to talk quickly, trying to appear controlled and sensible. “I thought it all out while I was going to Miss Kati’s house. My sister could say he was our nephew from Vienna. They’re the same age, and no one in Szentendre has seen our nephew.”

“And—”

Hopeless brown eyes mourned at him. “No one was there. I waited for two hours, but he didn’t come, and then the servant next door said he hadn’t been there when the truck came. The... the Gestapo searched the house for him, but he wasn’t there.”

One had escaped. Perhaps. Nicholas Rassay, fourteen, old enough—just—to look after himself for a few days if he was lucky. But how could he exist without papers or work if he didn’t have anywhere to hide?

“Where could he have gone, Marie, to school friends?”

“No. He had no friends at school. It was... difficult for him, you see, on account of his mother. They used to call her names and he was always fighting. He was very lonely at school; his life was here, with us, the family.” She choked, swallowed, gripped the bag again. How extraordinary that she should know so much, although of course it wasn’t strange at all. Nicholas had always seemed so happy he had taken it for granted that the boy was content at school. But Marie had shared every miserable humiliation with him, had known of his daily life in the same way that she knew Marta Ferenc’s laugh annoyed her husband.

“I’ll try to find him, Marie.”

“You won’t find him, Mr. Adam. If you could find him, then so could the Gestapo. I’ve walked through every part of the town in the last two days and I haven’t seen him at all. I wonder—dear Mother of our Lord—if they have found him already and taken him away.”

He felt as though lead were weighting his feet, stomach, brain, heart. It was hopeless. A few hours ago he had had a family, friends, people he loved. Now a giant hand had swept them away.

“There was one more thing,” she continued wearily. “The next morning, early, Mr. Leo telephoned—but I knew someone was listening on the line. He said he was coming back to save the family and I told him it was too late. I could
hear
someone listening, Mr. Adam. I could hear them. So before Mr. Leo could say anything more I told him to keep away, to run and hide, and then I rang off, packed my clothes, and left the house in case they came for me too.”

“Where have you been staying, Marie?” he asked, realizing suddenly that Marie had come under his area of responsibility. She had tied her life to the family, risked her future. Now she must be looked after.

“At the Rheiners’ house. I’ve been helping the cook there....” Her voice trailed away, lost in two days of atmospheric nightmare, walking through the town looking for Nicholas, cooking food for a strange family, sleeping in an alien house. He threw some coins onto the table and then placed a hand under her elbow and helped her to rise. “You must go to your sister at Szentendre,” he said. “I will go home now—I have things to do—but I will come early tomorrow and take you to Szentendre.”

“Yes.” She nodded lifelessly.

“You still have a family, Marie. Now you must think about them: your sister and her husband, your nephews and nieces. These are your family.”

But she only shook her head and let tears course unchecked down her cheeks. “The Ferencs were my family, Mr. Adam,” she whispered.

He watched her walk across the market place through the evening gloom, ghosts walking with her. He went back to the car and prepared to drive home, back to his mother, who was mad, and his brother, who was both mad and evil. He was tired, sick and soul-weary, and he kept seeing his wife’s small frightened face and his two children trying hard to protect her.

Towards the end of the summer the morning mist was so thick on the mountains it was impossible to see for more than a few yards. Once, waking early, he had stepped quietly from the hut and come face to face with a stag, an old bull, his antlers thick and scarred. Startled, the stag and Leo had stared at each other, and then Leo had retreated into the hut and the stag had turned and slipped away through the trees. Later he had seen a small herd of them on a clearing on the opposite side of the valley.

It was cold in the hut. The nights that he had to retreat there and hide he was always cold, even though it was summer. He could light no fire in case the smoke should be seen and investigated. He had a blanket and a bottle of
barack
to warm him and neither were effective in the early hours of the morning. But the cold and discomfort were more than compensated for by the mornings of peace and the evenings of quiet. He felt momentarily safe up in the mountains. The safety had something to do with his boyhood—memories of expeditions up into the mountains when the world had been a golden progress of sun and trees and hills, all filled with miracles. The nights up in the hut gave him back the dreams of his childhood, which even the far-distant thunder of the Russian guns could not destroy.

In the morning he watched the mist pale, then become luminous with flecks of sunlight. Finally it would wisp softly to the bases of the trees and then the whole air would burst into the golden glow of a September morning. As he gazed over the hills he could see little pockets of mist, clinging round the oaks and birches, giving a dressing of fairy-tale unreality to his mountain hideout. The unreality was worth any amount of cold and discomfort.

The gentle growl of the artillery was deceptive. The Russians were still a long way off, but the acoustics of the Carpathians carried the message over range after range until finally they mellowed into a soft rumble over Leo’s mountain hut. Sometimes it was possible to imagine that the noise was the preamble to a mountain storm; sometimes, up in the hut, he would delude himself that there was no war above a certain altitude. When the morning came and he had to start moving, the delusion vanished. He would slip silently down through the trees, avoiding the tracks and open stretches of meadow that flattened out amongst the hills. There was a thick, pine-covered escarpment close enough to the sawmill to make a good viewing point. From here, crouched low amongst the trees and shrubs, Leo could see the entire clearing.

Gabor had worked out a simple method of indicating whether it was safe to return. A huge oak had been felled some months before across an open piece of ground, and if some of the men were working on it, it was safe to come down. If the tree was deserted, he knew he must slip silently up into the hills again, not to the hut—that was safe only at night—but into the trees, constantly moving, keeping eyes and ears open for passing patrols. Once he had seen a German reconnaissance troop threading through the wood, studying possible passes where a defence line could be disposed, or so he imagined. He often heard rifle shots and presumed that someone was out hunting fresh meat. Several times, when the weather was clear, he climbed to a high point in the mountains from which he could see down to a thread of road. He wished he had binoculars—he even thought of asking Gabor to try and find some for him—for convoy after convoy passed through the valley making their way towards the west. “Running, running,” he gloated. “They can’t hold the Russians back any more! Now it’s their turn to be afraid, to have a juggernaut behind them, rolling forward, crushing them!” If he thought about it at night he couldn’t sleep. He grew excited and a maelstrom of thoughts and reflexes jostled in his fevered brain. The Russians were coming to liberate his tortured land. They would annihilate the Nazis, both German and Arrow Cross, and then, after the welter of the war had died away, a new Hungary would emerge, a Hungary free from foreign oppression in which the poor could at last live with dignity.

Planning the new Hungary rationalized his thoughts a little, but weaving through was the instinctive hatred of the Germans and the Arrow Cross men who had taken his family away. Where were they? What had happened to them? Rumours of unbelievable evil circulated, rumours that at first he had dismissed as foreign propaganda but that became more and more credible as the summer passed and the Jewish population began to vanish from the land. His hatred for the Germans grew to fanatical, unbalanced proportions, outweighing fear and caution. When he was working back at the sawmill, he tried to persuade Gabor to support him in a scheme to blow up the road where the convoys passed. “Kill the Nazis!” he cried to Gabor and then had to listen to Gabor’s slow and cautionary reasoning. “Kill them now? When the countryside is still swarming with them? They will tear through every village in the mountains until they find us—and you, my dear Leo, will be easier than anyone to find with your useless papers.”

He had papers, the papers of an Arrow Cross man that he had killed while making his way north to the mountains. He had been given shelter in a cottage on the outskirts of a village, hidden by the kindness of a middle-aged carter and his son. He had woken in the morning to the sounds of dispute and shouting. A local Arrow Cross man had come to “requisition” the carter’s pig in order to supply the local German unit. The shouted abuse, the arrogance, but above all the seething knowledge of what these men had done to his family broke Leo’s control and he found himself in the yard, a shovel in his hand, beating savagely at the head of the Arrow Cross man, who had not even had time to draw his revolver. Later, sick and shaken, he realized what he had done. He had no regrets for the death of the Nazi, but what of the carter and his son? Together they had loaded the body onto a cart and taken it up into the hills. Then Leo had dragged it into the forest and buried it under last year’s leaves.

He had taken from the corpse’s body the papers, the ration card, and a sum of money so large that it was obvious the “requisitioning” of local produce was a profitable private business.

When, finally, he had managed to find his way to the sawmill, the money was depleted but there was still enough to bribe the owner of the mill to keep his mouth shut. Gabor, whose name was the last in a series of links that led from the group in Budapest, had examined the ration card and the papers with punctilious care.

“The ration card is good. We can use it,” he said slowly. “All the men here hand their cards in and we are fed together. But the papers—” He stared at the picture of the huge, towhaired Arrow Cross man. “This is no good. You will have to pretend to be this man because of the ration card. But you must let no one see you who wishes to check your papers.”