Csardas (89 page)

The moan was from both of them, stifled between their bodies as soon as it was born. He was strong, incredibly strong, for all his thinness, and now, if she had wanted to move away, she could not. One hand behind her neck holding her mouth to his, the other at her back pressing, forcing her into him. It was like the Russians but it was not like the Russians because this time there was no resistance in her own body, only a longing to press back, to be used by this man who did not know how to be a lover.

She bore with his roughness, his awkwardness, even when he hurt her. Tomorrow there would be bruises on her arms and legs, but some old instinctive wisdom told her that now was not the time to check his clumsiness. She waited, a little afraid of his strength and also of the violence she had released in him. He did not kiss her a second time, just pressed her down onto the ground, using her acquiescent body to destroy the first hurt, the first uncontrollable emotion of his body.

When he lay still, before he could grow ashamed or turn away from her, she began to kiss him, cradling his head into her neck and brushing his eyes, forehead, cheeks with her lips. “Janos, Janos!” She stroked his hair, his neck, let her hand wander lightly, tenderly, over the rest of his body, told him she loved him, called him darling and beloved. She felt him stiffen against her, go rigid as though about to pull away, and then his body relaxed, fell against hers, began to respond, moving and stroking, and finally he pulled himself up on one elbow to look down on her. “Terez... Terez.”

No more than that, but the voice was everything, the voice of the poet and of the man who loved her but wouldn’t be able to say so, perhaps not ever.

He kissed her then, and this time it was slow, and became sensual. This time he was confident of her, and she of him. Lazily, in a world of grass and sun and fluttering moths, they smiled at one another while their bodies loved.

They lay a little while, sleeping, then dressed and wandered down the hillside. No words, but now there was no need for words or for the strangeness of their hands saying things their tongues could not. They stumbled because their arms were wrapped around each other, and when she shivered a little in the evening air he pulled her closer, protecting and comforting.

They had been driving for some time when he asked, “Terez, what do they think of me?”

“Think of you? Who?”

“Your family. Your mother, father—all of them.”

There was a long silence and then she asked, “Does it matter what they think? Does it matter to us?”

“Yes. Not to me, but to you. It will matter to you. You are a child of your family.”

She was silent again, then said, “Uncle Leo is jealous of you. Nicky adores you; so does George. My papa disapproves of you—your politics—but is in your debt because you have helped us. Malie, poor Aunt Malie doesn’t think of you or anyone else much at the moment. Mama—” She began to laugh. “Mama has forgotten that she hated you on the journey from Magyarovar. Now her complaint against you is much more convincing and relevant.”

She felt him tense again, and she quickly put her hand down on his thigh and let it rest there, a gesture to assure him of both affection and intimacy.

“Mama does not like you because you do not bring roses.”

“Roses!” he cried, aghast. “What time is there for roses?”

She loved him but was suddenly hurt because he had said that. So foolish and romantic to be hurt. Who could be hurt by such a thing? She tried to drown the thought in laughter.

“Mama has a great belief in roses. When she was a girl Papa kept one that had fallen from her dress. And Uncle David sent her roses the first time he met her in Budapest; he was always sending roses to the ladies.”

“She can’t expect me to bring her roses!”

“No, of course not. Roses are just a symbol to Mama. She means that you don’t bring flowers—to anyone—and you don’t pay compliments or ask people to have coffee with you or take little walks or go out. All those things to Mama are ‘bringing roses.’”

“It’s foolish. Embarrassing and foolish!” Strangely the criticism had affected him more than Leo’s jealousy or Adam Kaldy’s disapproval. Later, coolly and analytically, he was able to define why: the other criticisms had been those of personality or politics, but Eva Kaldy had pinpointed his background. Peasant boys cannot afford “roses,” and when they have grown up they do not know how to give them.

“Foolish,” he repeated angrily, and sadly Terez echoed his voice.

“Foolish, Janos. Mama is very foolish.”

He spent the summer suspended between self-loathing and an explosive happiness that at times threatened to destroy his reason.

He hated himself. He had diverged from his painless path of logic, forgotten the cardinal truth, learnt so cruelly years ago, that to love inevitably brings pain, makes one vulnerable, destroys the clear, pure path of reason and dedication. He had not wanted to love her—or had he? Even when they were climbing the mountain, her hand in his, he had not intended to touch her more than that—or had he? There was no moment, no point of realization when he had thought, I will take this girl. She likes me and it will be easy so I will take her. And yet from the moment he knew she was coming to Matrafured with him, the warmth had been there in his heart, the warmth of knowing that they would be alone together with a car in the country. And that one act in the hot scented afternoon, loving her, had destroyed his invincibility, made him weak again.

There was no place for love if you were an idealist seeking to fulfil a dream. Look at that fool Leo Ferenc, torn in all directions because of emotional ties of family and friends. Everything he had ever done in his life had been motivated by emotion. Even now—Party member and editor—he was torn between duty and worrying about the condition of his land-owning Kaldy brother-in-law, hovering between the two and making a good job of neither. That was what love did to one.

And this love, this embryonic tie, must be destroyed before it could root securely. He would not see her again, would not look out of his window at 8:25 every morning or join her at the Café Moscow for the lunchtime interval.

He maintained his isolation for a week and one morning could not bear it any longer and waited by his window from eight o’clock to see her crossing the square. Her small body was so dejected, the youth destroyed, the face so sad and hopeless, that he was unable to work all the morning and at lunchtime he hurried across the square to stand by her table.

When she looked up at him he was lost. Her face was transformed from misery to happiness in the second that it took to register his presence. Never—not since his childhood—had he had power like that over anyone.

‘“Janos!” she cried softly.

He had to sit, quickly, because the breath left his body and his legs were weak. How could he be that important to her? How could just seeing him make such naked joy appear on her face?

“Why haven’t you come before? Why haven’t I seen you?”

Staring at her, wanting to be alone with her, remembering her gentleness, her voice, her body....“I don’t know,” he answered tonelessly. “I’ve been busy.”

“Oh.” Her shoulders slumped a little, the joy went from the face. She picked listlessly at her portion of bread. He longed to reach across the table, fold both her hands in his, kiss them, close his eyes and know she would be smiling when he opened them.

“I love you.” The words came from some part of his brain over which he had no control. They said themselves, boiled up from a place of warm, flooding emotion. “I love you, Terez. I love you.”

“Oh, dear God!” She leaned back and closed her eyes. “Oh, dear God! I thought you hated me, thought you had used me and then forgotten. I thought—I don’t know what I thought.” Two tiny beads of moisture welled from beneath her closed lids and rolled down her cheeks. The madness seized hold of him again and he did what he had wanted to do, reached over and took her hands.

“I must see you, Terez. This evening, I must see you!”

“Yes, yes. Where?”

“Here. No—yes, I’ll meet you here. Then we can walk—the Kossuth Gardens—anywhere. I want to be with you, anywhere.”

“Can’t I come to your room?”

“No!” A spasm of fear. His room was inviolate, a retreat where he could not be hurt. And there was the Party. He did not want them sniggering, admiring, envying Comrade Marton who had staked a claim to a fallen daughter of the gentry.

They met. They walked in the Kossuth Gardens, speaking hardly at all, touching briefly when the evening grew soft and the people drifted away.

“I must go. Mama will be angry. She will want to know where I have been.”

“Will you tell her?”

A pause. “No.”

Was she ashamed to tell her mama that she had been with Janos Marton? Did the attitude of that selfish, petulant woman still affect her daughter?

“I will walk with you to the square,” he said coldly. Reason asserted itself again, cold logic balancing against the summer madness that obsessed him.

He went back to his room calling himself a fool, an adolescent, and all the other names he could think of. But the next morning he watched her cross the square, and when she looked up at his window and smiled he could think of nothing else but her for the rest of the day.

Once that summer they went to his room. He smuggled her past the porter and spent the evening worrying how he was going to get her out again. It was not a success, not like the day on the mountain. They were embarrassed, made awkward by the need to conceal what was happening. There was no joy or spontaneity between them.

“Why do we have to be so careful?” she asked. “No one cares what Party men do. Gabor has a woman; everyone knows about it.”

“I do not want people to think I have a woman.”

“Why?”

Why? He couldn’t answer. Sometimes he thought it was because he wanted to protect her from his colleagues’ ribald groupings of whores and mistresses. But also he was afraid—afraid of men knowing that he was human, was as weak as the rest of them. Once they knew he would no longer be strong and impervious to hurt. “Why do you not want your mama, your papa, your family to know?”

And now she was silent, unwilling to admit that she did not want to face the storm of disapproval and shocked disbelief that would inevitably ensue when her family knew of her attachment.

He tried to pull away again from her after that night, but it was hopeless. Whatever he did, thought, reasoned, he could not keep away from her, could not stop the wild joy in his heart when she smiled and said she loved him.

One morning, in the autumn, she did not come across the square, and at lunchtime she was not at her table in the Café Moscow. He descended into near madness, alternating between fear that she had gone from him because of sickness or disaster, and fury that she should be so careless of his feelings. By the time the evening came he had ceased to think clearly, and he snatched his hat from behind the office door and strode, like a blind madman, through the streets to the old Ferenc house. The refugees on the ground floor opened the door to him, and he thundered up the stairs and through the door into her apartment without thinking of what he was going to say to Leo or Eva Kaldy. The fates, for once, were kind to him. The apartment was empty of everyone except Terez. She was in her room, lying in bed, her skin slightly yellowed and dark circles round her eyes.

“Why didn’t you come today? Where have you been? You should have let me know what was wrong. Are you ill? Why didn’t you send a message to me?”

“I did, Janos! I asked George to take it to your office before he went to school.”

His anger evaporated. She had cared, bothered about him, and at once he was concerned. What had happened to the note? What was wrong with her?

“Are you ill?” A twist of fear. She was so like young Nicky. Supposing she had caught tuberculosis. She was small, not strong, even though she had carried the end of George’s stretcher. What if she were ill? An old nightmare: his mother, shrunk into a pain-stretched skeleton with the blue eyes faded and dull. Oh, God! This was what loving someone did to you, hurt and destroyed your reason. “What’s wrong?” he breathed, frightened to touch her in case his control should break.

“Nothing!” she flushed a little. “I just couldn’t go to work today, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“It’s nothing. You know, I just wasn’t well. I’m like that sometimes... fainting. It happens...”

“What happens?” he shouted. “Tell me, have you a weak heart? Why do you faint? People don’t faint unless they are ill. Why didn’t you tell me? I sent a doctor to Nicky, didn’t I? I would have found one for you!”

“Oh, Janos!” She flushed, furious with him. “Don’t be so ridiculous. I don’t want a doctor. It’s just—the way women are sometimes.”

It took a moment even then for him to understand, and when he did he felt foolish and annoyed, as though she had done it deliberately to humiliate him.

“Is
that
all?” he said contemptuously.

Her eyes grew watery and her tiny heart-shaped face crumpled a little. “Yes, that’s all. I’m sorry you’ve been bothered and concerned about me.”

How could he have been so unkind! Why did he hurt her, snarl at her when he loved her so much? And suddenly the dilemma, the ambivalence of the last months, vanished. Fatalistic acceptance swept over him. He threw away the caution of years, understanding at last that he had lost the battle with himself and could now only go one way.

“Terez.” Now that it was clear to him he could speak quietly to her. “It is no use, the way we behave with each other, hurting, pretending, and trying to hide things. It must stop. We must be married.”

He thought she had not heard, and then the smile began—a huge, slow, spreading smile that took away her pallor and sunken eyes.

“It is the sensible thing to do,” he murmured, unable to take his eyes from her face. Was that what he could do to her, make her as happy as that?

“Oh, Janos, I don’t think it’s sensible at all. I think it’s wonderful!”

The door slammed, and Eva’s voice shrilled through the apartment. “Terez! Are you all right? The door was wide open. Did I leave it like that?”