The Countess (38 page)

What happened next is something I can only recall dimly, as if in a dream. I called for Ficzkó, who with Dorka gathered up the gaggle of offending girls and ushered them into the cellars before me, weeping and clinging to each other, the backs of their heads in the lamplight like the manes of a herd of unruly horses. Something was in my hand, and I lashed out at them again and again with it, driving them before me. Someone cried out. Ahead I could see fat Doricza turn and, with the whites of her eyes showing, say something I didn’t hear or don’t remember. My blood was so hot in my veins I thought it would boil.
Save me
, it said.

At last we came into the cellars under Csejthe, where the wine barrels were kept and where Dorka had held the ones who had so offended her earlier that autumn. A strange smell was in the air, rotten and cold. Five of the girls were tied together and sent out of the room with Ficzkó to wait while Dorka stripped the fat one naked
to the waist. Her pearly white skin was so like the flesh of a pig, so rounded and rippled and pink, and when the first blow of my cudgel struck her on the back a pig’s noise too rose from her mouth, and a pig’s pink blood. The room was very cold and still and smelled strongly of copper, a stony, mineral smell. I struck her again, and each time the room went completely black, my vision obscuring and clearing again. She was weak, she was worthless. A few moments later, she slumped to the floor with the marks of my fingernails in her neck.

My vision cleared. The cellar came back into focus, dim in the torchlight, and the sounds of girls crying from out in the halls, and at my feet a pile of flesh that might once have been a girl, pink and red and rippling, but she was breathing; she would live.

Ficzkó asked what he should do with her.

I told him to leave her where she lay, and then to bring in the others and chain them there. As a warning, I said, and went back the way I’d come, into the
kastély
. Ilona Jó helped me change out of my soiled dress and crawl at last into my own bed, where I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep and did not wake until midmorning the next day, when the first rays of the sun fell slanting across my face, and I woke fresh, and feeling better than I had in many months, better than I had after the baths at Pöstyén. A new day dawning.

Ponikenus did not come to apologize to me all the next day, or the next. For two days I dressed to expect him, and every evening when I went to bed, I told Ficzkó that the priest would not be welcome when he arrived. But still I expected him. I set dogs at all the doors, and guards, and told them that they were to turn him back the moment he approached the house. That I would not see him if he were struck
ill by the plague. I kept to my room and read my books in the thin winter light, not remembering a word of them and seeming always to hear footsteps in the halls, on the stairs.

My son and daughters and sons-in-law left Csejthe on their return journeys, so that they might make it to Pozsony before the worst of the snow began to fly. I parted with them with many tears and wishes that they might stay, but they had their own estates, their own families and business to see to, and before long the winter roads might be impassable. Anna needed to be home with her little ones, and Kata to return to her comfortable house for the end of her pregnancy. You and Megyery were making your way back to Pozsony, then Sárvár. The gentlemen had not been good company the past few days at any rate, restless and bored and going out in the afternoons on long rides along the river valley to hunt, staying out nearly until dark, looking guilty when they returned. Wolves had been seen in the woods around the keep, and Megyery had an urge for a wolf pelt, so the others were taking him to look for one, they said. The idea of the old tadpole taking down a wolf was laughable to me, and secretly I wondered if the gentlemen weren’t visiting the tavern down in the village instead, looking for the company of other men instead of staying in the house with a gaggle of ladies. But I had said nothing of my suspicions for the sake of my daughters and for you, my son, who loved them.

When they were gone again and the house quieted, Ilona Jó and Kata Benecká and I spent the afternoon around the fire playing cards and reading out to each other some Latin poems that I had been teaching them. The house had sunk into an unusual state of calm and quiet, even the great white dogs at the door snoring and kicking their legs, dreaming of the hunt. But I felt an intense agitation, a mute anger that threatened always at the backs of my eyes, the palms of my hands. I found myself shouting frequently at Dorka, at Ficzkó, over the smallest infractions. Istók Soós would hardly come near me since I discovered that he’d got that stupid Dorizca with child—up at the keep while Anna was visiting, it must have been—for in my bitterness I could hardly set eyes on him without making
accusations. His thick bull-neck and his red face, his arms so broad that he almost could not put them down at his sides. Why had I never seen how coarse he was, how stupid and greedy? I could not believe that he, of all people, could turn on me after everything I had done for him. What was it about her you loved best? I asked him, again and again, my voice nearly breaking with animosity. I followed him from room to room waiting for an answer. Was it her stupidity, her laziness? The soft rolls at her belly? What?

Her silence, he said at last.

We were in my room, the room I had shared with him night after night for nearly three years. His words were still hanging in the air between us like smoke from a burnt-out candle. Silence, he had said. If he wanted silence, I would give it to him in abundance. He stood near the door, waiting to see what I would do, if I would fly at him, if I would collapse at his feet and weep. Once again I had been passed over for a younger woman. It occurred to me to have him taken to the cellars himself and whipped and beaten, but who among my servants, now, was strong enough to stand up to him? Who could I rely on except for Ficzkó, who was a dwarf next to Istók, and a bunch of old women?

I told him it would be best if he started looking for a new place. He would not be welcome in my home any longer. He seemed about to say something else, something he knew he would regret. Then he seemed to reconsider, set his great bull of a neck more firmly on his shoulders, and turned away. Left me there, alone, not even bothering to close the door after him. I watched him turn his back on me, sat at the window to see when he would leave. In an hour or two, just long enough for him to pack up his few things and saddle his horse, I heard hoofbeats retreating from the
kastély
, and after that I refused to hear his name spoken by anyone in the house. It would be as if Istók Soós, the wedding steward, had never existed at all.

It was four days after Christmas. The girls who had been taken away for stealing and kept in the catacombs under the hill continued to protest their innocence. I had Dorka and Ficzkó whip them a
couple of times a day until they reconsidered and asked my forgiveness, and report back to me on their progress, but so far there had been none. They still insisted they had done nothing wrong.

The night Istók left I went down to the passages that led from the manor into the cellars of the castle. They were dark and stony, with dripping white teats of limestone growing down from the ceiling. We passed small antechambers where barrels of wine were stored, and ice cut from the river in the winter kept buried in sawdust. Sometimes a white handprint or bit of writing smeared with age betrayed the long history of the place, and I wondered about the women who had lived here before, and all the ones who would come after. The smell of earth and damp was everywhere, and underneath it something sour and decayed, as if the stones and earth themselves had gone rotten. Ficzkó, who went in front of me, had trouble at times finding the way among the many passages and dead ends. Several times we had to double back to find our way, until I slapped his ear and told him to watch where he was going, that I did not have all day to wander around in the dark. After that we made our way with little difficulty.

In a little while we came to the room where the girls were tied up, chained to the wall and clutching at each other, naked and shivering, smeared with dirty handprints on their faces where Dorka and Ilona Jó and Ficzkó had slapped them, and bruises along their buttocks and under the shackles that bound their wrists. The room was wet along the floor, smelling of piss and blood, and cold, so that our breath came out in little white clouds. There was hay piled in the corners, and ash on the floor to soak up the wetness, and the smell of living things in close proximity—the smell of barns, and childbirth rooms. A frightened, animal smell. The torchlight flickered and gave everything a furtive look, as of things only half witnessed.

When they saw me, the chained girls began to wail and protest their innocence. They had done nothing, they said. They had taken nothing. Mercy, mistress, they said. Mercy, please, for the love of God. The fat Dorizca, her pregnant belly showing, the stripes on her
back crusted from where I had beaten her, pulled at her chains and tried to cover her nakedness, whimpering.

The flesh of her back bunched into little folds almost like a second set of breasts, the skin of her thighs bulging together at the top, at the place where Istók Soós had so willingly buried himself. I imagined them rutting in my room when I was out of the house, defiling the white bed where I had spent so many pleasant nights with him. She wrapping her fat legs around him, he burying his soft red mouth in her breasts. Laughing at me, and telling each other stories about me. Turning all the many kindnesses I had showed them both into less than nothing, into excrement.

Now I took the whip from Dorka’s hand. Doricza whimpered, and looked at Ficzkó as if to plead, but the boy wisely decided to say nothing. “Will you ask forgiveness,” I asked, “for what you have taken?”

“I did not take the tray, my lady. It was only the pears. I was going to bring the tray back to the kitchen when the pears were gone, I swear it.”

She swore she had taken nothing, but I myself had seen the tray in her room, I said.

The cook had given her the pears, she said.

I said the cook was the one who had accused her of stealing.

At this she began to cry. “I never did,” she said. “I never took anything from your ladyship, I swear it. Don’t you remember,” she said, “don’t you remember when we went to Bécs, and the other girl, the one who died, you remember you gave me that coin? You gave it because you liked the work I had done. You promised that I would be rewarded. You promised my mother you would try to find me a husband, but I have lived here six years and have never heard of a husband yet. You promised my mother, when she brought me here, and I have done nothing but be loyal to you and treat you with kindness. I only wanted a pear.” Her face was blubbering with snot and tears.
Save me
. “It was Christmas, and I wanted a pear. That’s all. Just the pear. I was hungry, and no one was eating them, why couldn’t we have them?”

“If you had asked me,” I said, “I would have given them to you.”

“I did ask,” she said. “I asked Istók Soós if we could have them. Ask Istók, he will tell you. I asked permission, and he said we could have them. He gave me the tray, I swear it.”

“Istók Soós is gone,” I said. “He left this morning. He took his horse and rode away, and left you here with me.”

Her blubbering echoed in the underground caverns and infected the others, set off a chain of wailing that assaulted my ears. The girl had been nothing but incompetent since the first I had taken her into my home. She had been less than worthless at Pöstyén, at Bécs. I could not have thievery and dishonesty and incompetence among my maids, and now she had lain with Istók Soós, whom I had been obliged to send away. Once again a young girl—a simpleton, a whore—had come between me and a man who loved me. Once again I had lost the comfort of affection, and pleasure, to one I had trusted, to a girl of no education, no breeding, no worth.

As if in a dream, I raised my hand and put the lash across her back myself, over and over. Her back was a mess of stripes, the yellow fat showing through the wounds. The floor sticky, my clothes. There was blood on my hands, my face. The room went dim again, and cleared, and dimmed, the slow beat of my heart in my ears the only sound, though I could see their lips moving, I knew they were saying something to me, imploring me for something, but I did not know what.
Save me
. The girl slumped forward, curled on the ground like a pig that had its throat cut. Silent.

From behind me I hear, as if from underwater, the sounds of weeping, perhaps my ladies themselves, perhaps the girls still chained together to witness the punishment of Doricza. Perhaps it is myself. It comes to me from very far away, like a horn, like a clatter of hooves. The girl is naked on the cold stones and her eyes are closed, and I think, she must be cold, we must get her off the floor before she freezes, or she will be no more use to me. I tell Ficzkó to cut her down and have Ilona Jó tend her wounds. There is spiderweb, I say, and plaster to make her well. The women look at each other. Ficzkó
bends and picks her up under the arms, but she is bigger than he, and he stumbles. “She’s dead,” he says.

“What did you say?”

“Countess, the girl is dead,” said Ficzkó. “Plaster and spiderweb won’t help her.”

Somewhere behind me someone begins to cry. There is another voice, raised, shouting, one of the chained girls.
Škrata
, it says. Witch. A bit of spittle flies out and lands on my cheek. Anger. White anger, and cold.

I raise my hand and the heavy end of the whip—a lead bludgeon wrapped in strips of leather—and bring it down on the head of the one who spoke, the one nearest me, who is so filthy I can’t make out who she is. A cracking noise, like the breaking of stone, and the room grows dim before me, blackens. I am alone in the darkness, and then, as if from a great distance, colors come back to me, sounds, light. There is a girl in front of me, a girl crying. Her nose is bright with blood, and her eyes tear, making tracks in the dirt on her face and the blood. There is something about her eyes that is familiar. Her eyes are green and watery, like someone else’s I knew long ago. I recognize her, I think. A cousin I took in a few years ago when her mother wrote to me that the young men of her village had all died in the Turkish wars. I had promised to get her a husband, I wrote the mother. Éva, the name comes back to me now. Éva Cziráky. A pretty little thing, with a sweet singing voice and a mass of yellow curls, like my cousin Griseldis long ago. How small she looks, how frightened. For a moment I wonder what her days are like, what love there is for her, whether she feels fear, or anger, or pity, or love. Whom does she love? What have those she loves done to her? There is blood on her face, running off her chin in little spins and rivulets. I’m not sure how it got there. My hands grow numb; something falls to the floor. There are raised voices and shouting, and the barking of dogs, but it’s all a distant roar, like thunder heard from underground. My heartbeat slows and steadies; my skin is damp. There is blood on it.
Someone is taking my arm, someone is speaking in my ear. I cannot hear them, I don’t know what they’re saying.