The Countess (5 page)

It was a soft misty morning in June, and the gray stone walls of the battlements were alive with bunches of greening lichen and strands of flowering ivy. Bits of white fog hovered over the house, over the wooden bridge that led away from the inner fortress. The revelers were still on the estate, and some of them had tumbled out onto the grass of the courtyard during the night and lay here and there, wrapped in cloaks and lying in piles of two and three. I hid behind the yews to avoid being seen, making my way to the front gate of the inner castle, and stepped onto the wooden bridge over the marsh. There the sun peeked through and lit the reeds with golden light, the herons moving on their long sticklike legs without a splash, searching for fish and frogs, and the insects went silent as I drew near. Finally I reached the outer battlements and then the road that led out of the marsh to a sloping grassy field. A copse of hawthorn partially hid the plain from view, but the tang of the mud
and the reeds, the fertile smell of earth not yet planted, permeated everything.

In front of this idyll the place of execution was prepared. Even before I saw them I could hear the screams of the gypsy women, each word an arrow thrown at the accused man in their mysterious sharp language. A great crowd had gathered to see the condemned man’s fate, and I hid among the skirts and trousers, scattering a flurry of pecking chickens as I made my way to the front of the crowd where the gypsy knelt on the ground, his hands tied behind him, the ties held by two of my father’s soldiers. He seemed large to my nine-year-old eyes but was probably of medium height, with a dark pockmarked complexion and a bushy mustache that drooped at the corners with snot and tears, for he was blubbering and begging for mercy, turning his head around wildly to catch the eye of someone who would take up his cause.

Finally he addressed my father. Sir, he said, I am a guilty and sorry sinner. I have no right to ask, it’s true, but please, sir, spare my life. Surely nothing good will come of killing one poor gypsy today, and so many guests still in your house. Surely you would not want such bad luck coming to your house during the celebration for the birth of your daughter.

My father would hear none of this. He said the condemned man had no right to speak of anyone’s daughter, having sold his own. It was worse than the crime of Judas, a man selling his own child to the invaders. “As to bad luck,” my father said, raising his great white head, “I would accept any on my house to be rid of the sight of you.”

The condemned man slumped forward again, his chin against his chest in a faint. The soldiers held him by the rope that bound his wrists behind him, holding his weight at an unnatural angle, for his arms had been broken. He looked like nothing so much as the puppets my sister and I liked to play with in our rooms, sewed rags stuffed with straw and just as lifeless. My throat itched with unshed tears, but the sight of my father there and the stern tone of his voice when he addressed the man filled me with awe, so I hung back behind the skirts of the village women where no one would notice me.

A little bit away from the crowd the soldiers had taken a horse, an old and scrawny brown mare with a swayback and each of its ribs showing, and tied it to the ground with tight ropes around its legs so that even though it struggled and thrashed, it could not rise. The noise of panic it gave was the sound I had mistaken, from a distance, for the voices of the gypsy women, who were instead silent and grave at the spectacle my father had prepared.

One soldier stepped forward and slit the animal’s tawny belly from front to hindquarters. It gave a scream and tried to kick out its legs, but it could not move, could not do more than shudder and heave as its bowels and blood spilled out onto the ground.

Quickly the soldiers stuffed the accused man inside the belly of the horse until only his head showed. Then one of the soldiers took a piece of cord and with a great curved needle and some rope began sewing up the horse’s belly once more. The gypsy cried and begged for his life, but the soldier kept sewing. The horse was still alive but no longer had the strength to fight. Its eyes rolled back in its head, showing the whites. When the soldier was done, the man’s head lay between the horse’s rear legs as if the horse were birthing him, just as my sister’s dark head had poked out between my mother’s legs a few months before. It was the strangest sight I had ever seen—the soldiers standing around in their armor, watching a man sewed up inside a horse like a doll sewed up with its stuffing. A great bubble of laughter rose within me, a hard lump of awe and terror rising from my belly like a ball of unbaked bread that I had swallowed and would have to expel before it made me ill. Sputtering, the laugh escaped my lips. I clapped my hand over my mouth, but it was too late—I had been seen.

The man looked into my face and begged me to get a knife and cut him free, said that he had done nothing wrong. “Please, pretty child,” he said in his strange, accented Hungarian, “please, I didn’t hurt my daughter, you must know, she was a little girl your age, I would never hurt her. Please set me free, pretty one. I will give you
a great reward.” There was in his voice a malevolence that was new and strange to me, for terror ran underneath the kind words, and the look in his eyes was glittering and full of hate. What would he do to me, to the child of the man who condemned him, if I dared to set him free?

My feet were rooted to the spot, my hands clenched inside my skirt. But then my father was there, bending to scoop me up and take me back inside, scolding me for rising so early from my bed and running away from my nurse, though he could not bring himself to punish me, his favorite. He marched me back through the fortress and up to my room, scolding the nurse too for letting me slip away so easily. Then he kissed me and bade me back to sleep, which was impossible, and then closed the door after him.

I went to the window instead. Outside in the distance I could see the soldiers making their way back into the fortress, leaving the man behind to struggle and rot inside the belly of the dead horse. The other gypsies, the men who had accused him in their drunkenness, quickly packed their things and left Ecsed, ready to put the place and its sadness behind them. A few old gypsy women lingered long enough to curse and spit at the man for the sake of his vanished daughter, and then they, too, joined the rest of the gypsies in putting some distance between themselves and Ecsed village, and the estate of my mother and father, where bad luck was bound to linger.

All day I remained in my room thinking of the man inside the belly of the horse, of his thirst and pain, the smell and the flies. I ate no supper and went to bed so early and with so little fuss that my nurse told my mother I must have been ill.

Late that night I slipped out of the gate and went to the place where the man and the horse lay together, one dead and the other dying still. I found my way easily in the moonlight, following the gassy stench of entrails and old blood. The man was delirious and half mad, and at first he didn’t know anyone was there, his head waving back and forth with the sudden, jerky movements of the
demented and the dying. His skin was baked red and dry from a day in the sun, and his mustache was brittle with the tears and snot that had congealed there.

My footsteps were loud in the dry grass, and he turned his head back and forth to look, but I was behind him, momentarily hidden. “Is someone there?” he called out, but from where he was sewed inside the horse he could not turn his head and see me. “A drink, please,” he begged. Nothing of the earlier menace remained in his voice; it was replaced with supplication, with pitiable chokes and sobs. “A sip of water is all I ask.”

I stepped forward and showed myself to him in the moonlight. He roused himself and struggled. “I know you, child. You are the daughter of the lord of the house. Can you give me a little water? A sip for a dying man? I will ask nothing else, I promise, just a taste of cool water to ease my way into the next world, oh, please.”

“I have no cup,” I told him.

“Dip your skirt into the marsh water,” he said. “You can bring it to my lips and wring it into my mouth. A drop or two is all I ask. You can do that much, can’t you?”

I thought for a moment and then walked toward the edge of the marsh, where the reeds parted and a bit of dark water shone in the moonlight. I bent and let the hem of my skirt trail in the water, let the threads soak up the cool liquid. Then I walked back to the place where the condemned man lay. He beckoned me closer with a wag of his head and smiled, showing his pale gums, his strong white teeth, for he must have seen the dark stain on my skirt where I had dipped it into the water. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, come closer, child, and wring that cloth into my mouth. God will reward you for showing kindness to a dying man.”

I stepped forward, lifting the hem of my skirt. The gypsy opened his mouth and closed his eyes, ready for the drink, but I stood back several inches from his face and wrung my skirt out onto the dusty ground, onto the dried entrails of the poor horse that had died for the sins of the man. The water dropped onto the dust and vanished.
The man, hearing the sound, opened his eyes, struggling and cursing. I spit in his face, and the white spittle caught in his mustache and hung there like a bit of spider silk. I was never so satisfied as I was at that moment, watching him suffer. I thought of his daughter, of her fear and pain, of her sadness that no one in this world had stepped forward to protect her, not even the man who should have loved her most. I spit at him again as he wailed in his strange language about the agony of thirst, of loneliness, of death. I bent my face close to his, so close I could smell the
pálinká
on his breath still, and something else, something rotten coming up from within like old death, but I was not afraid.

“You suffer too little,” I told him, and went back up to bed.

How strange are the memories that rise up when one is deprived of sleep and warmth, of all the comforts of ordinary life. I remember so well the gypsy man and the anger I felt, the exact timbre of the wail that rose from his throat, my cousin Griseldis and her yellow curls, though I cannot remember the name of the guard standing outside my door or what the old steward, Deseő, said to me this morning when he brought my tray. Perhaps I am simply growing old, thick with memories and dreams, another old woman who fears to sleep in case she will not wake again.

I remember the first time I spoke to Orsolya Kanizsay, the way she bent down to look into my face like a horse trader in the market, deciding how much to pay for this year’s foals. Your grandmother was one of the grand ladies in the room the night I slipped away to the great hall to watch the guests dancing and drinking and falling in love to the sounds of the gypsy music, before drunkenness
and greed spoiled the party. She must have watched me carefully all that week while I greeted the guests and helped my mother, while I entertained my sisters and cousins. Apparently she found nothing objectionable in my behavior, for the morning after I made my visit to the gypsy man my mother came to fetch me early from my bed, flinging back the shutters to let in a shaft of burning light and telling me to dress myself at once. “Half the house is already up for the day,” she said, “and here you are still in bed. What will Countess Nádasdy think?”

“Why should she think anything?” I asked.

“Erzsébet,” said my mother, “I need you to get up and dressed at once. The countess is the most important person at the party. She has asked to see you, and you will oblige her or so help me I will beat you with a willow switch until you cannot sit. You will be sweet and charming and dutiful, and that is all you will be.”

She had the nurse wrestle me into a clean dress and yank the knots out of my hair with a comb, tears starting from my eyes with each tug. István, passing by the door, must have seen the expression of pain on my face, for he stopped to laugh at my expense, so angry was he that I had left him alone in the children’s court while I snuck down to the party. My mother caught sight of him enjoying my misery and said, “Go check on your cousins, István, for God’s sake. Make yourself useful.” And she closed the door on his antics until I was dressed and ready for my interview with Countess Nádasdy.

When I was dressed, we hurried downstairs to my father’s library, where he sat across the table from a grand lady with silvered dark hair and a dress of deepest black. A widow’s dress. I had seen her at the party, of course, and knew who she was, since my mother had taken special trouble to introduce me to her the night she arrived, but I did not know what was so important that now I was summoned to speak with her and my parents alone, while the other guests were gathering for the midday meal.

I curtsyed, waiting to be spoken to as my mother had taught me,
and stood back. Lead cream whitened Orsolya’s spotted cheeks, giving her a waxen, carved kind of look, her reddened mouth in a round
O
, her eyebrows plucked and arched into permanent surprise. I did not like her cosmetics, having heard my mother say often that women who whitened their skin and blooded their lips were nothing but ridiculous old crones who wished to catch a young husband. Around her neck she wore a great jewel, a ruby as large as my nine-year-old fist surrounded by a circlet of gold bent into the shape of a rose. My fingers itched to stroke the delicate metalwork, the polished red surface of the ruby. Countess Nádasdy is the most important person at the party, my mother had said, and when I looked at that jewel I knew that it must be so. I curled my fingers into my palms. Without knowing entirely why, I smiled and bowed and said what an honor it was to meet her, that I had heard of the greatness of Countess Nádasdy and wished to serve her however I may. “Please,” I said to my shoes, “be as one of our own family during your stay.”

The countess bent and cupped my chin in her cool whitened hand. “My goodness, Anna,” she said, “what a silver tongue this one has. You must be terribly proud of her. And such a face! Ferenc will love her fine dark eyes, her pretty little mouth. No, I do not think he could do any better.”