Csardas (85 page)

Once there had been money, unlimited money. There had been the farm and Papa’s bank and all the securities and shares and land that the Ferencs and the Kaldys and the Racs-Rassays had amassed between them. And now, now there was nothing—no, not quite nothing, for Adam had 100
hold
of stripped, grainless, cattleless land and the Kaldy farmhouse, and Leo and Nicky had the gutted Ferenc house and the salary from Leo’s post as editor.

It was the way it should be, Leo told himself. A man should not be blessed with more than his neighbour when that neighbour was starving, ill-clothed, and ill-housed. Oh, yes, it was fair, the new system, but how was he going to keep them all—Nicky and George and Terez—on his salary? There were the taxes on the house (and how long would the house still be considered theirs?), medicine for George, and the price of food soared out of all proportion to his useless, inflated, newly printed money.

He began to understand—for the first time really understand—about poverty. It wasn’t just hunger or cold or no shoes or sickness and death. It was constantly working out, sometimes on pieces of paper and sometimes in one’s head, how to keep four people on one crazy, varying salary. (Money was useless; there was one morning when he had to price the paper at 20,000
pengo
a copy!) Poverty was his feeling of relief when Adam managed to send from the farm a little food that somehow the Russians had overlooked; it was constant anxiety about young Nicky, who got thinner, coughed badly, tired easily, and obviously needed more than the lentils and black bread and dried beans that was their staple diet.

He knew that some of his comrades on the committee were taking advantage of their authority to steal, coerce, and buy extra food from black-market sources. But he had been told he was an idealist, and idealists did not do such things. Janos Marton didn’t, and therefore neither would he because whatever that peasant child could do he could do also. In his mind Leo had a curious division of ethics. He could buy from the black market, or even cheat and steal, provided it did not infringe on his position as editor and committee member. If he could get hold of money or exchangeable goods in any way, he would happily pander to the joint Russian-Hungarian underground market that seemed to be flourishing in certain quarters. But how to get the money?

The burden grew. He felt like a married man with an ever-increasing family of dependents, for in July Adam brought Eva to the town, a tired, over-worked Adam and a frightened and fractious Eva.

“I think it best that Eva stay here with you, Leo,” Adam said heavily. “It is growing difficult at the farm. The local Communist agent constantly harasses us, and the Russians up at the manor.... Eva’s nerves are bad. After her terrible experiences she cannot bear the strains and pressures. Now that you are the important one of the family, the powerful one”—it was said without rancour, without bitterness, merely a bald statement of fact—“you are obviously the best person in the family to provide protection.”

Oh, yes, true. But did Adam think that the importance and protection enabled him to feed yet another mouth?

“I’ll send down some food, whatever I can find,” Adam continued, “but I expect you don’t have too much bother with extra supplies in your position.” And now there
was
bitterness. “The Party men up at the farm do very well indeed, at my expense.”

How could he explain to Adam that he did not do very well indeed? Adam—poor, loyal, trustworthy old Adam—didn’t understand at all about the new ways that were coming. He just thought that now there was a new aristocracy. Before the war,
he
had been one of the rich ones, and now the others, the peasants and Leo, were the rich ones. And because Leo was family he would provide for them all, just as they had provided for Leo in the old days.

He tried to explain; then his voice died away. A vain, foolish pride refused to let him ask Adam for money or food. He felt torn between his loyalty to the code of family and to his ethics of Party incorruptibility. He kissed his sister, promised to do his best, and then escorted his brother-in-law back to the bus station. It was surprising—shocking—to see Adam (younger son of the land-owning Kaldys) climbing onto a bus amidst peasants, workmen, and the odd Russian soldier. But that was the way it would be from now on, for all of them. No favours, no special treatment.

“Thank God we have some transport again,” he said to Adam through the glassless window. “Everything is getting back to normal. Soon we shall be able to plan ahead, decide how we are going to live in the future.” He smiled but his brother-in-law did not smile back. As the bus pulled away he wondered why he felt so very miserable, and on the way home he realized it was because he was worrying about the cost of feeding his sister.

It was Terez who helped. She understood, more than all the others. She came into his room that evening and shut the door so that no one else should hear what she was saying.

“Uncle Leo, I have found myself work—or rather Janos Marton has found it for me—in the Department of Agriculture at the County Offices. From now on we shall have two salaries to help keep us. And later—who knows?—we may even be able to persuade Mama to go out and try earning a little money.”

She smiled, and his first reaction was one of infinite relief. He had to control himself from jotting down her prospective income on a piece of paper and allocating it to various expenses. And then he remembered the way she had been brought up, and the way his sisters had been brought up, and who she was—a Kaldy.

“Will you be able to manage, Terez?” he asked weakly. “I mean, you have never worked—not like that. What will your mama and your papa say?”

“Oh, Uncle Leo!” she said impatiently. “Do you think we don’t know the world has changed? I’m nineteen years old and I’ve lived through the war! Do you think I’m going to sit at home waiting to get married like Mama did?”

“Will you know how to work?” he asked, realizing it was insulting as soon as he saw her flushed face.

“I wasn’t exactly idiotic at school,” she said stiffly. “If the war hadn’t come I was going to persuade Papa to let me go to university, to study biology. I’ve not worked before—not like that in an office—but I think I’m bright enough to learn.”

“Yes, of course,” he apologized. “It will help considerably, Terez. I don’t have to tell you how it will help.”

“Nicky and George and I talked about it,” she said. “George said that as soon as his leg was better he would get work too. And Nicky—” She paused. “Nicky came with me to see Janos. He wanted work too.”

“And what did Comrade Marton say to that?” he asked coldly, resenting the way Marton was interfering in his family affairs.

“He told Nicky that he wanted him to go back to school, George too. He said that they would be of more service to him in the future if they were trained and educated.”

Service to him! Not service to the country or their family but to him, Janos Marton!

“And afterwards, after they’d gone, he told me that he didn’t think Nicky was strong enough to go to work or to school. He thinks Nicky is ill.”

“Yes.” The fear again, the fear that went with money and food and inflation. “Yes, Nicky is ill.”

“He’s going to find a doctor to come and see Nicky. A chest doctor.”

“I see,” he answered bleakly.

“I’m telling this to you now, Uncle Leo, so that when Nicky begins saying he wants to find some work, you will say what Janos has said—that he must go back to school in the autumn.”

“Very well.”

Her frown vanished. She smiled and hugged him. “Uncle Leo, I think I’m going to enjoy going out to work for my living!”

Eva shrieked and cried, lay on her bed with a wet cloth on her forehead and said her daughter had betrayed her. “Going out just like a factory girl or a streetwalker!” she screamed. Leo wondered how it was possible that his sister was still living in a dream that had died before the First World War. She had spent a year disguised as a peasant, hiding from the Germans. She had survived bombing, the Russian liberation, and the stripping of her husband’s family estate. And yet she was still behaving as though life consisted of nothing more than meeting friends for coffee and going to the dressmaker, the hairdresser, and a succession of balls and parties. He listened, astonished, to her tirade, and he listened, with even greater astonishment, to the way Terez handled her.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Mama,” she said coolly. “No amount of screaming will prevent me from working. If you want to eat, then I must provide food for you, must I not?”

Eva sobbed, dissolved, said how cruel the world was when a mother couldn’t even afford to indulge her pretty daughter any more. Terez just patted her hand and said, “That’s better, Mama. Much better. Don’t make things difficult for us.”

“Difficult!” Another shriek. “How could I make things difficult when the Russians have already done that?”

Another pat, affectionate but also admonitory. “No more noise please, Mama. It will be very enjoyable, going to work every day. And besides”—her dark eyes flashed wickedly—“I may meet some suitable young men at the County Offices! Where else am I to meet men these days?”

“A fine kind of man you will meet there,” grumbled Eva, but she was quieter, more thoughtful, and later she asked Leo to see if there were any trunks left in the cellars, any of their old clothes that the ransackers had missed.

“My poor little girl,” she moaned. “No pretty clothes to wear. Going out into the world with no pretty clothes. I want to alter some things, make her a dress—some blouses—anything pretty.”

An occupation! Something to keep Eva busy and stop her from wailing all the time. He watched her cut and alter, stitch and furbish all the old garments of twenty and thirty years ago. Her complaints changed to reminiscences and he realized that Eva had blotted out the knowledge that her daughter was going to work “like a factory girl or a streetwalker.” Terez was going into society. That her debut involved her going to the County Offices every day at eight o’clock was part of the changing times. But at least she would go in suitable garments.

From his Party office in the main square he watched her every day, watched her treading lightly along the cobbles, her slender bare arms swinging out in the sun. Some mornings he could see she was singing. He couldn’t hear, but he could see her lips moving and could tell, from the way she walked, that a special rhythm was sending her along.

It became part of his day, looking at his watch at about 8:25
A
.
M
. and then rising from his desk and going to the window, watching her in the morning sunlight. One morning the phone rang just as he was about to rise and without waiting to hear who it was he just said, “Marton here. Please ring me back in a few moments,” but when he got to the window he had missed the best part of her and she was disappearing into the County Offices.

She was young, full of hope and energy, and yet there was something old-fashioned about her, something that reminded him of the Ferenc and Kaldy ladies sitting on their verandas, that reminded him even of his own mother, although Terez was dark, brown-eyed, tiny, where his mother had been fair and tall.

She still wore her hair in braids at a time when every other girl had short hair curled into the neck. The braids were piled up high and wound round on the top of her head. It made her look just a little taller than she was. And her clothes were old-fashioned. Everyone’s clothes at this time were old and shabby, but Terez wore frocks that looked like dresses of thirty years ago. There was a cream one with a lace collar that made him remember—still with a faint stab of pain—his mother, although he could not think why, because his mother had never owned a dress like that. And then one day, as the sun slanted onto the lace collar, making everything yellow and light, he remembered the cottage and the sunlight shafting in through his mother’s lace curtains, and although the lace of the curtains and that of the girl’s dress were different, the sunlight, the golden shafts, and the feeling of happiness were the same.

At 12:30, she left the County Offices and walked across the square to the terrace café that had once been the Franz-Josef and was now (as a tribute to their liberators) the Café Moscow. There she ordered a coffee and took from her bag a carefully wrapped parcel containing black bread. He couldn’t see if it were a sandwich (perhaps she had a little cheese?) or just bread, but she bit into it with all the gusto of a healthy nineteen-year-old who never had quite enough to eat. At 1:10 she finished her coffee and walked back to the County Offices. He didn’t see her any more after that because he became very busy in the afternoon and often had to go out on business. But the mornings, and then the lunchtimes, became isolated moments of his life in which he drifted into a past of sunlight and lace that was also the presence of a young woman who had said she was his friend.

Summer came, the warm, soft, dry weather. It was more difficult to be ascetic, rational, all the time in summer. He had always found it harder to bear his restrictions in the hot months. As a child, sent away from home, the miseries, the loneliness, the insults and laughter had always been harder in the summer. And then as a man, disciplining himself, he had found it encouraged self-indulgence, found it harder to ignore outside distractions and concentrate on plans and policies. One summer he had even indulged in a brief, somewhat torpid affair with a visiting Party member, a thick-set young woman who was five years older than he. The affair had taken excitement from the shared secret fear of arrest and imprisonment that faced them all in those days. But he knew it would not have developed at any other time of the year except the summer.

And now, this summer, the summer of his success, his climax of achievement after years of ideological struggle, he was drifting into foolishness again—foolishness that he recognized, deplored, but that made him walk down to the Café Moscow one lunchtime and stand beside her table.

“Hello, Janos,” she said through a mouthful of bread. “Are you going to have coffee?”