Csardas (27 page)

“Were you away from your supply lines?” she asked. “When you advanced into Serbia, were you cut off from letters and things like that?”

Felix sat down. He wouldn’t look at either of them. His eyes roamed nervously over the ceiling, the floor, the curtains, the lemonade glasses.

“Felix! Eva is speaking to you!” Madame Kaldy was distressed. The girls had never seen her so disturbed. Her hands were twisted together in her lap and her brow was arched into nervous lines.

“What? Oh, sorry.... No, I wasn’t in the forward line at all.”

“Was the fighting dreadful?” Eva persisted.

“I didn’t have to do any,” he answered, and then he shuddered involuntarily as though he were going to retch.

“We were worried. When you stopped writing, we wondered what had happened....” Her voice trailed away as she realized that Felix wasn’t listening. Piteously, forgetting that Felix’s mother was her arch enemy, she turned to Madame Kaldy. “He didn’t answer any of my letters,” she cried. “He hasn’t written to me at all, not since last November.”

“And why should he?” snarled the old woman. “Why should he write to you when I, his mother, only received two postcards in all that time?”

“But why?” Eva was nearly crying. The shrill plaintive tones of her voice finally pierced Felix’s abstraction; he frowned, irritated by the noise. “Why did you stop writing, Felix?” she screamed.

“Stop? Did I stop? Oh.... I don’t remember. I’m sorry.” He stood and began to pace rapidly forward and back, forward and back, across the room. “So hot in here,” he muttered. “I think I shall go and rest.”

As he passed, Amalia was disturbed by something else. It took a second for her to realize what had perturbed her. Felix smelled! From his body came a stale, sour odour that was a mixture of dirty underclothes and an unwashed body. She was nauseated, not only by the smell but by the fact that her sister could be so obsessed by this lazy, apathetic creature who lay on his bed while his mother picked her own fruit crop like a peasant woman.

“Come, Eva! It is time we left,” she said angrily, rising from her chair, and the unaccustomed note of authority in her voice made Eva obey. “We are sorry to have interrupted your afternoon, Madame Kaldy,” she continued. “We shall not call again unless by invitation. In these troubled times it is not always convenient.”

Madame Kaldy shook her head. “Come when you like,” she murmured. “Come when you like. Who knows, you may be able to cheer him; I cannot.”

They could not say good-bye to Felix. He had already disappeared without speaking to them or even looking back; Malie glared at Eva, who seemed to be hesitating over whether or not she should follow him.

“Come, Eva,” she said again, firmly, grasping her sister by the arm. “We will go home now.”

“Malie?”

“We must go home now. We can call again later, towards the end of the week; Madame Kaldy has said we may. And we can bring Mama. Felix always enjoyed Mama’s visits. Perhaps Mama will cheer him.”

Eva allowed herself to be led to the door and out into the hall. “Yes,” she said loudly, “we will come again at the end of the week, with Mama.”

As they began to descend the veranda steps she looked out at the long hot path shimmering in heat haze.

“Oh, Malie!” she sobbed. “It’s such a long, long walk back to the farm and I’m so hot!”

Amalia pursed her lips, tightened her grip on Eva’s arm, and began to march her firmly over the baked track.

They visited the Kaldys again many times that summer, with Mama, without Mama, and on one occasion with Papa as well. It made no difference. Felix was apathetic and disinterested to the point of rudeness. On some days he was cleaner than others, but this was almost certainly due more to the promptings of Madame Kaldy than to any returning self-respect. All efforts at cheering Felix were met with the same gloomy abstraction. Picnics up in the hills, a tennis party at the Racs-Rassay villa, the harvest celebrations on all three farms—every distraction proved pointless and depressing.

In August everyone was roused to fury by Romania’s declaration of war. Transylvania, long coveted by Romania, was invaded, and Hungarian citizens were forced to flee from their mountain farms. Papa and Uncle Alfred spent long hours raging against the iniquitous Romanians, and even Mama shed some tears for the land they had lost (the Bogozys had once possessed a small estate close to the River Arges; it had long since been gambled away, but Mama felt a family affection for what had once been theirs). Felix received the news of the invasion of Hungarian soil with a mild flicker of interest which quickly evaporated into apathy.

In September he returned to Budapest; his posting had been changed and he was no longer with the army of occupation in Serbia. And at the end of September when they had all returned to the town once more, Felix was again on leave.

“How strange,” said Malie thoughtfully. “It is almost as though the army has no use for him.”

On his way back to the Kaldy farm he called to see them, the first sign of a desire to be sociable he had shown for several months. In his uniform he looked slightly more like the old Felix, handsome and smooth, but the edge had gone; the wit and sharpness that always made Felix such a delightful companion was no longer there. And sitting in the drawing-room of the Ferenc town house, he paid little attention to either Eva or Malie. His conversation was all of Mackensen’s recovery of the Romanian territories.

“No one can stand against Mackensen!” he said, and he stuttered slightly in a wild, unnatural kind of way.

Papa strode over to a small table that stood near his desk. Since the outbreak of war a map of Austria-Hungary and her neighbours had lain permanently open with flags marking the fluctuating progress of the war. The western fronts were not so important (it was obvious that the war was going to be won here, in central Europe, where it had begun) and if necessary could be briefly looked at in Papa’s
geographia.
But the Russian, Italian, and Serbian fronts had to be kept within easy reach so that everyone could acquaint themselves with the situation at a moment’s notice. “Yes,” he said ponderously. “It seems obvious that Mackensen will lead his armies straight across Romania to the Black Sea, and then”—he paused dramatically and moved his finger on the map—“and then, what is to stop him driving north, directly into Russia?”

“I’ve seen him.” Felix stuttered again. “I’ve seen Mackensen advancing—not him, you understand, but his armies. In Serbia... I saw... I was there... the soldiers... I saw...”

He was suddenly embarrassingly uncontrolled. His eyes were shining and a slight nervous tic began at the right-hand side of his mouth. Eva and Malie looked away from him. Mama was staring out of the window, not paying any attention, but Papa had noticed Felix’s strangeness, and he looked at him and frowned.

“Yes. Well, Felix, I am sure you have a very good idea of our allied commander’s tactics. One would like”—Papa rolled back on his heels and addressed the room authoritatively—“one would like to study in detail the brilliant manoeuvres and techniques of Mackensen. Not for nothing is he called the Lion of Lemberg. Further, he seems to have the gift of leading armies of mixed nationalities and welding them into a loyal and patriotic unit. I believe he commands Germans, Bulgars, and Turks as he advances into Romania.”

“They were the worst, the Bulgars!” Felix cut straight across Papa and failed to notice the tightening of Papa’s mouth. “But we were just as bad... we... and I couldn’t stop them. An officer, so I had to pretend it was my orders.... The same in Romania.... It must be—I’m not there, though, am I?”

Everyone in the room was silent. Mama had stopped looking out of the window and her face was turned in astonishment to Felix. The tic had spread right over his face and a thin stream of saliva trickled from the corner of his mouth.

“Are you ill, Felix?” Eva asked, frightened.

Felix rose suddenly and walked to the door. He made a noise that could have been anything and fumbled for the handle. Then he made another noise which sounded vaguely like good-bye and was gone. There was a coldness in all their hearts, the same coldness as when Karoly had stepped down from Uncle Alfred’s coach like a sick old man. Sometimes the war was too frightening to understand.

There were so many ways of measuring time. You could measure it by the mounting piles of letters: from Karoly if you were Amalia, from Adam Kaldy if you were Eva. You could measure it by the way the little boys had changed. They were no longer round, terrorized lumps of childhood but leggy independent young boys whose lives alternated between school and the stables. At seven and nine they seemed to be divorced from the family, spending much time plotting in corners and chasing out of the house on mysterious boy’s errands. Sometimes they returned and, for no apparent reason at all, sought out Malie, pressed her hands or hugged her, and then were away again. Leo came to her secretly when his end-of-term tests were due to take place, and slowly and painstakingly she went through sums and spelling with him and calmed his tendency to tearful nerves.

You could measure time in big, important ways too. Franz Josef was dead and a new Habsburg stood in his place. The Czar of Russia had abdicated and a revolution was taking place. The war had virtually ceased on the eastern front.

Several times a day Malie thanked God for the Russian revolution. She was sorry for the Czar and she supposed Papa was right when he said that it was a dangerous thing to overthrow an established authority. But oh, God, if there was no fighting on the Russian front, then Karoly was safe. His letters throughout the autumn of 1917 spoke of stationary positions and forays that became idle excursions. No fighting, no killing, none of that hideous advancing and retreating across the Galician plains with cholera and typhus ravaging the armies as well as the Russian guns. If he could only stay there, safe on a non-active front until the war was over! Now that Serbia was finished, and Russia almost so, there was only Italy to defeat. She dreaded hearing that he might be posted to the Isonzo as Adam had been. The fighting in Italy was brutal, the casualty lists long. It was a war of rock, ice, and front lines so close they sometimes blew themselves up as well as the enemy. Adam had lost three fingers of his left hand with frostbite. They had thought he might be invalided out, but after a long stay in an Austrian hospital he had been sent back to his unit without even being allowed leave.

Every night she prayed that they would leave Karoly there on the harmless Russian front: please, please, dear God! Everything else was working so wonderfully. Papa, in between bouts of preoccupied depression, seemed at last to have forgiven her initial disobedience. He was gracious, comparatively so, when she told him Karoly had been promoted yet again. Their marriage prospects, once so hopeless, now seemed within reach—if only they would leave him on the Russian front. She could bear the boredom, the worry, Eva’s bad temper, Mama’s vagueness, and Papa’s gloom if only Karoly remained in the east.

Papa’s severe moods had made them all a little afraid, until it had been ascertained that, after all, it was nothing that any of them had done; it was the state of the war which was apparently affecting the state of Papa’s bank. The strikes in Budapest, the reports of famine in Vienna, the mutiny of the Austrian fleet, all sent Papa into periods of black anxiety. He spent a lot of time closeted with Uncle Alfred and Aunt Gizi in his study, and then Aunt Gizi, and finally Uncle Alfred, too, began to look worried.

The morning came when Papa informed them that a visitor would be coming to stay for a few days, a visitor from Budapest—Mr. Klein.

There was a shocked silence around the table. Never before had Papa invited a visitor to stay in the house. Mama’s Bogozy relatives occasionally turned up uninvited but were usually dealt with hastily by Papa (a monetary transaction in the study) and left the same day. Papa had no relatives other than Gizi, and permission for friends of the family to stay had never been granted, either to the girls or to their mama. Papa was either impervious to the air of astonishment or chose to ignore it.

“I wish Mr. Klein to be given every possible welcome in our house. Marta, I know you concern yourself very little in matters of the household, but I would like you to conduct affairs a little more splendidly than usual. Some formal dinners, an extra maid perhaps, just for the visit, and the china and silver I bought from your father, the Bogozy silver—I will have it removed from the vault at the bank and I would like to see it used at table.”

“Yes, Zsigmond.”

“Is it the same Mr. Klein, Papa? The Mr. Klein who sent me roses in Budapest?”

Papa stared coolly at his daughter, eyeing her in a dispassionate, almost calculating way. “The same Mr. Klein, Eva.”

Mama began to sparkle. Life would have motivation again, if only for a few days. She knew she didn’t run the house very well—why bother when Marie was so capable?—but she was perfectly able, and would enjoy, arranging a few splendid days: luxurious dinners with musicians and hired servants, crested silver trays carried in and out of bedrooms, bowls of flowers, special dishes and the Bogozy monogrammed glasses (one hundred and fifty years old) filled with vintage wines. Her back straightened and she ran one thin, elegant hand up the back of her hair.

“He is important, this Mr. Klein?”

Papa gave her the same look that he had given Eva, an assessing, considering look, as though wondering how much support he could rely upon.

“He is very important indeed, Marta. He has just returned from Switzerland. Mr. Klein is one of Budapest’s leading bankers and does a great deal of business in Switzerland.”

“Oh!” Mama fluttered. “Zsigmond, how can we compete? A traveller, a cosmopolitan, he will be used to exotic foods, clever conversation, exciting programmes and people.” She wasn’t really bothered at all; they could all see that. She was a Bogozy—shiftless and disorganized—but a Bogozy who knew quite well that she was capable of entertaining, graciously and with charm, the King and Emperor himself. Papa ignored her and began to roll his table-napkin.