Csardas (72 page)

“I understand, Aunt Malie, they wouldn’t hurt Uncle David, would they? I couldn’t bear it.” She choked a little and stared hard out of the window. “No one would want to hurt Uncle David, would they?” All the youth, the spirit, was drained away from her. She looked at Malie, her face entreating the comfort she had always been given as a child. But now she was no longer a child and there was no comfort to offer. Malie turned away, unable to watch her destruction.

“When you get home, Terez, try to talk to your papa about... everything. Your papa will know what to do, and you must help him. Your mama—your mama isn’t very sensible. You must try to see that she does everything your papa tells her to do. It’s important now.”

Terez didn’t answer. Her face, over the navy-blue school skirt and blouse, was white.

“What about the rest of you?” she asked suddenly. “Grandpapa and Grandmama and Karoly and Jacob. And little cousin Nicky, what will happen to him? He has only Aunt Kati to look after him.”

“Uncle David will look after all of us.” She choked. “He will care for us all. You are not to worry.”

Terez rose, put her arms round Malie and hugged her once, very fiercely, before running out of the room. Malie heard her feet on the stairs and then the door of the house slammed. She crossed to the window and watched her hurrying under the branches of the bare wet trees, down the street towards the square. Going to meet Jacob from school, she thought tiredly. Perhaps it’s as well she’s going home, quite apart from the war. Foolish to have cousins, only two years apart, living in the same house. Perhaps that’s why she’s so upset.

She watched the two of them that night at dinner. They were quiet, sitting next to each other, as close as they could without disarranging the placing at the table. Jacob, her son, was always quiet, but now his stillness had a heavy despondency about it. Terez had obviously been crying.

So that’s it. Now it begins all over again, the loving and the suffering. You think your children will never feel pain the way you felt it, and it happens all over again.

When Adam came the following Sunday to take his daughter away, she noticed that Jacob wasn’t there with the rest of them to wave the car on its way. She glanced up and saw his face at the window, staring with all the intensity of an eighteen-year-old about to be bereft of his love. And she felt only relief that Terez was going away before the affair could spring into something violent. This was no time to have to cope with the problem of cousins falling in love.

She thought a long time before going to see Janos Marton. She spent hours at night, brooding, imagining, trying to get inside the mind of a man who could hate the very family who had helped him to rise from the poverty in which the rest of his kind lived. What kind of man could hate like that, sustaining it over the years, waiting for revenge? She tried to relate it to herself. Whom had she ever hated? Papa, yes, during the first war, oh, how she had hated Papa for the pain and hurt he had caused her, the cruelty and the punishment he had inflicted on her because she had fallen in love. But she did not hate Papa any more. As she grew older she had begun to understand him, and now she felt sorry for him, for him and for her silly mama. She tried to remember what she could of Janos Marton. He and Leo had had some extraordinary feud that had begun with the death of Uncle Sandor. Leo had been unbalanced about that. She recalled a scene at someone’s wedding—Kati and Felix’s—Leo kicking the child’s father, the child hitting back. But what could have turned a boyish skirmish into a man-sized desire for revenge?

It was easy enough to find out where he lived. She was a Ferenc. She had only to telephone someone at the County Office and within a very short time a courteous clerk called her back with an address on the industrial side of the town. At the last moment she asked Kati to come with her. If Janos Marton hated her family because he felt underprivileged, because he considered that Leo had ill-used him in some way, then Kati might be able to help. No one had been more ill-used than Kati, and all it had done to her was make her detached, given her an air of abstract isolation that only a few people could penetrate.

She took a tram to the Racs-Rassay house. It was shabby and run-down now; how ashamed Aunt Gizi would have been. Kati and her son had a bedroom each, ate in the huge old ground-floor kitchen, and lived in the room that had once been the old drawing-room but was now Kati’s studio. All the other rooms were shut and draped in dust-sheets. A woman came in once a week, tried to clean, and took their clothes away to wash. Kati and her son went out to lunch on weekdays in a rather weird café close to Nicholas’s school, and on Sundays they came to lunch with Malie and David. When Malie saw Nicholas at her luncheon table she wondered if he had enough to eat the rest of the week. She suspected Kati was an unreliable and erratic caterer. But whatever their private living arrangements they seemed to be devoted to one another and very happy.

When she arrived at Kati’s she felt a faint twinge of embarrassment. Kati was getting so odd, shut away with only her paints and her son for company, that sometimes, as on this particular occasion, she didn’t seem to notice what she had put on. She was wearing an old fur coat of Aunt Gizi’s, a sealskin that had been fashionable thirty years ago. Her feet were thrust into leather boots and round her head was a red silk bandeau with a bunch of poppies pinned at the side.

“Will you be warm enough, Kati?” she asked carefully, staring at the bandeau. “It is very cold outside and you really need a hat.”

“Red is a lovely
warm
colour.” Kati smiled. “Nicholas is coming with us. I thought on the way home we could go and have tea somewhere. He loves having tea with you, Malie.” Her eyes clouded over a little, then brightened again. “You don’t mind, do you?”

She did mind. She was tense and worried enough without having to think about what she was saying in front of Nicholas. But Kati’s face was so eager and confident she could do nothing but nod and smile back.

Nicky came racing down into the kitchen and flung his arms round her. He was a demonstrative and affectionate child, the way Kati had always wanted to be but never had. Every time Malie saw the boy she felt the same sense of shock that Nicky was so very handsome. Even at twelve he didn’t seem to suffer from the legginess, or the awkwardness, or the skin ailments of most boys. He was neat and handsome, with a soft endearing smile and a permanent expression of excitement, as though he was always expecting something nice to happen to him.

“I’ve had a letter from Uncle Leo!” From his pocket he took a worn, creased envelope and waved it at her. “Uncle Leo is serving with some
very
interesting people, Aunt Malie. He has a doctor with him, and a man who was in the government, and a newspaper owner. He says after the war he will take me to Budapest to meet them all!”

Leo, dazzling the younger generation again, even from a labour camp. He had enchanted Karoly, Jacob, Terez, and George, and now Kati’s son was going to be bewitched by the family rebel.

When they went outside Nicholas took the letter very carefully from its envelope and walked ahead of them, reading it silently to himself. The two women shuffled along in the slush, Malie, tall and neatly dressed, still smart and attractive in spite of her pre-war clothes, and Kati, clinging to her arm, slipping and laughing, with the red poppies becoming damp and bedraggled as the damp got to them.

“Sometimes I wonder why I’m so happy,” she confided to Malie. “I shouldn’t be, not at all. I’m a ‘disgraced’ woman and no one really wants the embarrassment of having me in their home. And the war is frightening for people like us; we don’t know what is going to happen—oh, Malie, don’t shiver like that—and yet I am happy, very happy.”

“You understand why we are going to see this boy, don’t you, Kati? I explained on the telephone.”

“Yes. I understand. Leo tried to tell me once the way he felt about Janos Marton. He was always convinced that Marton hated him.”

Malie felt a slight twist of jealousy. Leo had always been so much
her
brother, and yet he had talked to Kati about things he had never discussed with her. “I thought it a foolish notion,” she continued, pushing the envy away from her, “but David—David says someone is making things difficult for us. He would be angry if he knew what I was doing, visiting the young man, but I’m so afraid! And I feel I must try to do everything I can. I feel as though I am living all the time in a bad dream. You know the dreams you have, Kati, where nothing horrible actually happens, and yet you are walking through something that is ominous. That’s what it’s like now. Every day is like that.”

“I know.”

“But you just said you were happy.”

“I’m happy now. But that’s what it was like when I lived with Felix and his mother. Every day was like that.” She gave a quick, small shudder. “Everything is good now. I have Nicholas, and I have you and the family. But I remember what it was like. That’s why I’m coming to Janos Marton with you.”

The fear lifted a little from her heart and she felt comforted, not quite alone. There were things—vague, intangible things—that she could not share with David because she loved him in a very special way. But Kati was a woman; she was not ashamed to tell Kati about her fear. Always in the past Kati had been the one needing protection and assurance, but now Kati seemed older and more experienced than any of them, more experienced and more honest, more sincere. She looked down at the funny little figure clinging to her side and a wave of affection brought the never-far-away tears to her eyes. “Oh, Kati! What would I do without you! What would any of us do without you?” She fought the tears away, ashamed. Always crying. What was the matter with her? Was it her age? She must try and keep control.

On the tram Nicholas got the letter out, read it again with an expression of smug pride on his face, then stared out of the window at the darkening streets.

“How’s school, Nicholas?”

“All right.” The pride vanished from his face and she wished she hadn’t asked. She knew from Jacob, who was in his final year at the school, that Nicholas’s position was not particularly happy. He had been registered as Nicholas Rassay, but inevitably someone had found out just who he was and who his mother was. She never saw him walking to and from school with friends, and he never played with his fellow pupils. His friends were his cousins, and his family were his aunts and uncles. He never spoke to any of them about what happened to him at school.

She looked from him to Kati and wondered if the time would ever come when he was ashamed of his mother—not of what she had done but of her curious appearance and her increasingly odd manners. They were such a devoted pair, but inevitably Nicholas would grow, like her own sons—Karoly, next week, to a labour camp!—away from her. Tears, fight them back, swallow them, remember who you are, Mrs. Klein, Amalia Ferenc.

When they alighted from the tram it was Kati who with assurance led the way through the bleak industrial streets at the southern end of the town.

“We come here walking sometimes,” she said explanatorily. “It’s interesting. We often have ideas when we walk here, don’t we, Nicky?”

They found the house, a tall brown-brick building with a flight of stairs leading up to a succession of landings. Mr. Marton was out, said the caretaker. He was out but would be back very shortly. The two women and the boy waited while the slush rained down on them, partly from the sky and partly from the leaking gutters along the front of the building. The caretaker stared at Kati. The stain from the poppies had smudged onto her face, giving her a curious raddled look, like an old whore who had only put rouge on one side of her face. He looked from her to Malie, every inch a lady. Quality.

“I could let you into Mr. Marton’s room and you could wait there,” he said. He didn’t like Janos Marton. He wasn’t friendly and he never gave him presents like the other tenants did. Furthermore he was a peasant. You could always tell; the accent came through however hard they tried. He was a jumped-up peasant and he had cold blue eyes and cold manners to go with them. If he was annoyed when he found two ladies and a boy waiting in his room, so much the better. All the rooms were in the caretaker’s charge and he could do as he thought fit.

“That would be agreeable,” said Malie, fumbling in her purse for the right amount of money. The caretaker led them up three flights and unlocked the door, He bowed, pocketed the money, and left them.

They were in a small bare room that was more like a prison cell than someone’s home. An iron bed, a desk and chair, a wardrobe, a sink—everything was scrupulously clean, immaculately tidy. There were no curtains, just blinds drawn up to the ceiling. The only signs of human habitation were a row of books on the desk and a yellowed, torn picture pinned onto the wall opposite the bed. It was a picture of a stag drinking from a stream.

“Why, look!” said Kati from the desk. “You didn’t tell me he was a poet!” She didn’t touch the book, just pointed to it in the row. Malie bent down and saw a thin blue-bound volume.
Poems.
Janos Marton. “He’s been published,” said Kati, surprised. “How strange we never knew. Adam has always been so interested in his progress. We must read them, Malie. Not here; we’ll buy the book in the town and read them.”

Strangely the poems didn’t make her feel any easier. If he was clever enough to write poems, he was clever enough to be a dangerous enemy. She sat on the edge of the bed and tried to think what she should say. What could she say? What proof did she have that he was giving their names to someone in authority? And if she said the wrong thing she might make it worse. Her hands began to tremble and she was overwhelmed with a sense of inadequacy.

They heard feet on the stairs, quick, angry feet, and then the door burst open and a thin young man, vaguely familiar to both of them, came in. Malie could tell he was angry. There were two bright spots of colour on his cheeks, and immediately he was inside the room he darted a quick glance toward the torn picture of the stag, as though assuring himself that they hadn’t stolen it.