Csardas (78 page)

“I can stay here then?”

“For a while. Possibly for good, until the Russians come. They are not far away, I think. The Germans are stripping the country like hysterical locusts. They are up here once a week to see that every piece of timber that is cut goes straight back to Germany. When they come you will have to hide on the mountain.”

“The owner of the mill?”

“For this money”—Gabor held up the packet of stolen notes—“he will pretend not to notice you, although you will be expected to work here in return for your food and a place to sleep, over there in the workshop.”

“Can he be trusted?”

Gabor shrugged. “He is growing afraid. The Russians are going to win, and he is quite willing to take out a little cautious insurance policy on the future. Can you work a radio transmitter?”

“Yes.”

“Can you understand Russian?”

“Yes.”

“What was your profession? Your employment?”

“Journalist, translator.”

For the first time since his arrival Gabor smiled. “Good, good. We can use you most happily.”

He was exhausted and pleased to settle in one place. He had been walking, hiding, back-tracking, and trying to trace people who were links in the chain for five weeks. The weeks had been like a murky dream, for all the time he had been hovering on the verge of madness because of what he pictured in his mind. One morning he had seen trucks of people—Jews—being driven across the country and had thought his head was going to explode. But Gabor had given him back his sanity, had provided a reason for
being
when he knew that the others no longer
were.
He could channel his hate, his fear and despair. It could be used for revenge and the building of a new Hungary. But still the nights were difficult, nightmares of reproach and indulgences of the imagination. Only the nights spent up in the hut gave him peace.

In October he had to spend four days up there. Each morning he went to look at the clearing and each morning the tree was untouched, although he didn’t need the sign because the clearing was seething with German soldiers. He knew a moment of panic, and then reassurance. These were soldiers, not Gestapo, and their function was obviously to hasten the loading of timber.

He ranged over the mountains during the day, finding blackberries and nuts to supplement his bread ration, which might have to last a long time. He was cold and hungry, but the enforced break from reality gave him back his sense of balance. He became strong again, knowing that despite what had happened to his family he must follow his own path of reconstruction, must help destroy the Nazis not only for revenge but because Hungary must be liberated and rebuilt.

They came up into the forest one afternoon, five soldiers and a team from the sawmill. Hiding in a thicket of bracken and scrub, he watched them choosing timber and realized what a good woodsman he had become. All the old tricks of boyhood had returned: he knew the best places to hide, how to move silently, how to destroy tracks by using streams and rock faces. This summer and autumn had taught him other things as well: how to ignore the cold, how to manage on very little food, and how to sense when danger, in a German or Arrow Cross uniform, was close at hand.

On the fifth day the Germans went from the clearing. He waited until two men began hacking branches from the tree, and then he slid down through the undergrowth and melted in amongst them. One of the two men on the oak was Gabor.

“Horthy’s been deposed,” he said, without looking up from his work. “He announced an armistice with the Russians. He’s been taken to Germany. The Arrow Cross men are solely in charge now. The news from Budapest is bad, very bad. Do you have anyone in Budapest?”

“Friends, no family.”

“It sounds like indiscriminate massacre.”

Hatred welled up again. The peace of four days vanished into neurotic dreams of revenge.

“But it will not be long now,” Gabor continued dispassionately. “The Germans are pulling out—and have you listened to the guns? They are louder. Much louder.”

They were louder. They had been the background noise of the sawmill and the mountains for so long that he had ceased to notice them. But now he listened and realized that the increasing volume was no acoustical trick. The Russians were advancing.

“Things will change,” Gabor remarked, motioning Leo to the other end of the saw. “There will be fewer Germans, but more Arrow Cross.” He turned and spat into the withered leaves of the tree. “Madmen and lunatics. Their days are numbered and for a few weeks they will behave like cornered rats. You and I must be ready to hide up in the hills.”

“You too?”

Gabor nodded. Beads of sweat flew from his forehead onto the moving saw. “My papers are better than yours, but the Nyilas are unpredictable and kill without reason. You and I are too valuable to be killed.”

Two weeks later the lookout down in the valley signalled that Arrow Cross men were coming, and this time Gabor, obeying some instinct of his own, left the camp with Leo. They took with them the radio transmitter, two blankets, what rations they could muster, and their partisan identity cards printed in Russian that had been issued from the central partisan group in the town. They set off eastwards, across the hills, towards the sound of the guns, and as they breasted the first rise they heard behind them, from the valley of the sawmill, the sound of rifle shots. They did not look at each other, but Leo, who was leading, hastened his pace.

As they moved over the mountains it became obvious that Gabor was neither fit enough nor skilled enough to live in the forests. He was a planner, an organizer, but his body was not equipped to stand a hide-and-seek life in the hills. It was very cold. The first falls of snow lay on the trees and open slopes and they had to be doubly careful when camping at night so that their tracks didn’t lead others to their resting-place. Leo carried the transmitter and as much of the other equipment as he could. But even then Gabor moved slowly and clumsily.

Finally Gabor himself broached the subject of his inadequacy as a mountain walker. They had found shelter in a cowherd’s hut placed high on one of those secret hidden meadows that the mountains abounded in. Gabor, after leaning exhausted against the stone wall for half an hour, had then set up the transmitter. Leo went outside to collect wood and fill their small can with snow. Whenever they were fortunate enough to find a hut, they allowed themselves a small fire after dark. The snow, when melted and mixed with meat extract, made a kind of soup that was at least hot. He stood for a while, watching the flashes in the sky to the east, nearer now, much nearer. The guns could no longer be mistaken for thunder. They were unmistakably guns. When he came back inside, Gabor was sitting by the transmitter.

“I have made contact with them,” he said quietly. “With the Russians.”

Leo’s heart began to pound. The Russians... their liberators. It was nearly the end now: the end of the war, the end of oppression, and the end of an era. He should be happy, but always at the back of his mind was the memory of his family. There was also another unease, one he had difficulty in placing. The Russians—there were rumours, but surely they were only rumours. In a war armies behaved as armies, soldiers as soldiers. Whatever happened in the next few weeks—months—was only the final death spasm of the war. His people would ride it out, as they had ridden out so much else, and then the new world would begin. Nonetheless the unease persisted.

“Do you know where we are?” Gabor asked, watching him through the dusk.

Leo nodded. He had known for some days that they were approaching the mountain range that lay to the north of his own town. Somewhere, a little to the south-east, were the hills and woods of his childhood, the farm, the meadow where he and Malie had played, the Kaldy land where Adam still lived—as far as he knew, and Eva and George and Terez.... His mind clamped down quickly. If he thought about Eva and her children—and especially if he thought about Terez—the sick screaming rage that made him lose control of himself would take possession once more.

“Good,” said Gabor, and then he smiled, a wintry, self-deprecating smile. “I have been a bad traveller, Leo—oh, yes!—I have slowed us both and I do not have the ability you possess to live from these woods. But I knew where we had to come. I can still navigate, and we have come east this way for a very special reason.”

Leo watched the snow melting in the can. Without answering Gabor he took their carefully hoarded bread from his rucksack and cut two pieces from it.

“Tomorrow I shall go down into the village south from here. My papers are foolproof enough for that. In the village is someone—a contact—who will give me a map of your town. On the map will be marked all the German gun emplacements and also the site of the steelworks and the arsenal. When I return you will take the map through the German lines and give it to the Russians.”

“I see.” He tried to appear as cool as Gabor, but excitement was racing through his veins. At last, at last he was able to fight back, to make some kind of mark, however small, against the enemy.

“We should have gone together,” Gabor continued slowly. “But I realize I will delay you, Leo. It will be too difficult for you if I come.”

“I can go quicker alone.” No point in lying, just to save Gabor’s feelings. He would go quickly alone, quickly and efficiently.

“You understand the significance of the map, Leo? It means that your town will be treated as a partisan community. The German gun emplacements will be destroyed, but the steelworks and arsenal will be left—and so will the rest of the town. Any family or friends of yours will be comparatively safe.”

Safe. Desolation swept over him because for a moment he had believed that down there, in the town, his father and mother, his sister Malie and her family, were all living in the old house just the way they used to. He had envisaged himself riding in with the Soviet army and finding them there just the same....

Two days later, when he began his journey over the mountains, his emotions were still unsettled. He sensed himself slipping into unreality, and so he forced himself to picture the old house as it now must be, empty of everyone, dirt and rubbish blowing into the courtyard, the windows broken. Then he tried to accept the knowledge that they were all dead, each one gone. He went through the list rationally. Mama, Papa, David Klein, his brother Jozsef, his nephews, Eva, Malie, Terez... oh, no! The last two he could not bear. Not Malie, who had been closer to him than any other human being, and not Terez, whom he loved because she was warm and bright and like the daughter he had never had. Tracking up through the snow he tried to bargain with God.
Give me these two back and I will try not to bear hatred and venom in my heart. Just these two. I know they are all dead
...
all, all dead
...
but give me a miracle, God, give me these two back and I will bear with humility everything that life offers me from this day forward.

He was still praying, walking and praying, with the guns thundering ahead of him when something cracked down on the back of his skull and shattered him into darkness.

From failure to victory. From waking in the snow with blood trickling down his neck and three narrow-eyed Mongols grinning down at him, to the embraces of two Russian “comrade” officers who kissed him and then handed him a water glass filled with vodka. His head, roughly bandaged and aching from the rifle below, exploded into agony with the vodka, and through stars and pain and coloured lights he heard the belly laughs of his grateful hosts.

Lying in the snow he had gurgled “partisan” at them and had been rewarded by three rifles thrust against his chest. He could only just understand them—the Russian he had learned was never like this—and they obviously had just as much difficulty understanding him. Finally he had managed to convey that he had papers—it was a war of papers and one’s life depended on always having the right ones at the right time. A moment’s panic as a huge hand in a grey glove fumbled at his breast pocket. Supposing none of them could read! But the partisan card in Russian had turned their grins to puzzled frowns and a discussion had ensued which he just managed to follow. Was the card genuine, or was it a Nazi fabrication for spies? Should they shoot him now or later? After more frenzied explanations, the passing round of the map, and the surrender of his wrist watch came another trek through the snow with his head dripping blood and the uncertainty of a trigger-happy Mongol with a rifle in the small of his back.

A hunting lodge swarmed with grey-clad Russian soldiers who looked, extraordinarily enough, just like the pictures one had seen of them in the First World War, and a succession of “comrade” officers, all staring at the map, all suspicious of his motives and surprised because he could speak their language. He was never to understand fully the dialects of the soldiers, but to his relief the officers were perfectly comprehensible. He explained, showed his partisan card, referred to the contact between Gabor and the Russian operators over the transmitter. The map vanished. He was given a chair and a cigarette which he would have happily exchanged for some water and then, after several hours, the officers had returned with smiles and a glass and a bandage for his head. After the second tumbler of vodka he had a curious sense of
déjà vu
—the moment just before the rifle had descended on his head—and, just as expected, he spun forward onto the floor again and lay there, listening to his hosts singing melancholy but tuneful songs of Russia.

His intention had been to return through the lines and make his way south to the town. Gabor had said he would wait there, joining up with the main partisan group and forming a committee to try and bring order out of the disintegrating chaos of the town. But in the morning his comrade revellers of the night before turned stony faces towards him and said, “You. Stay here. Later you can go, when we go.” He was not locked in—there was really nowhere to lock him—but as he wandered round the temporary camp he was accompanied by two guards with rifles. If he ventured too far from the camp’s perimeter he received a rough nudge in the ribs with a gun. The shelling grew heavier, but now it was nearly all from the Russian side. Had the Germans retreated entirely? Was the map accurate?