Csardas (74 page)

If I come home, what of my work, he thought, the work of the Group? We are supposed to be ready in case the worst should happen. They need me to help form the resistance in case the Germans move in. He looked at Malie and thought of the two old people sitting downstairs and knew that he had no choice.

“All right, Malie,” he said slowly. “I’ll come home for a while. I shall have to return to Budapest and clear up my things, finish my work and give up my room. But I’ll be home as soon as I can, in a couple of weeks.”

“Oh, Leo! If only you would!”

“I promise. You’re quite right to remind me of my responsibilities, especially now with Jozsef gone. Mama and Papa—it will probably help them to have me here.”

It didn’t register with them when he first told them. They looked at him with the lost, bewildered look of children. Only when he was leaving them did they come to life, frightened. “Where are you going, Leo? When will you be coming back? Soon? How soon?” They watched him from the doorway when he walked across the yard with his bag in his hand.

“I’m coming back,” he called. “Two weeks, no more, and I’ll come home and stay.”

The two helpless old faces pleaded. Insecure, afraid, they watched their one remaining son walk away. And Leo always remembered that his last glimpse of them was framed in the doorway, like two gentle children who did not want to be left alone.

When, on March 18, rumours of an imminent German invasion began to circulate through Budapest, he decided to delay his return no longer. He packed, cancelled his outstanding lessons, and burned some of his more incriminating papers in a tin standing on the stove. Then he tried to telephone home to Malie, to tell her he would be arriving on the following day. There was something wrong with the line; the operator tried for an hour and then told him there must be a fault and he should try again next morning. He decided not to bother. He would go straight to the station and catch the morning train. There was no need to telephone.

When he arrived at the station he knew it was hopeless. There were troop trains blocking the rails, German troop trains. The station was full of Gestapo, and three grinning Arrow Cross men strutted at the entrance, demanding to see the papers of anyone entering. As he hurried away he saw a convoy of trucks bearing down the middle of the road through the quiet Sunday street, making their way towards the river. He went back to the café deciding it would be safer to sit there, until some kind of public announcement was made over the radio. He wasn’t surprised, just resigned to the inevitable, but there was a sore, sad place in his heart when he thought of Malie trying to explain to the old people what had happened to Hungary.

Malie, forgive me, he thought. I’ve left it too late, and now I can’t get to you. But I’ll come as soon as I can. I’ll find a way of getting to you somehow.

Isolated in splendour, the splendour of a dinosaur left over in a later age, Madame Kaldy presided over a manor house empty of everything save servants and the spasmodic presence of her son.

Felix, when he was at home, was as adoring, as solicitous as ever, bending over her wheelchair with care, calling her “Darling Mama,” bringing her posies, and only sometimes did she detect the patronage, the impatience in his voice. At one time he always used to tell her long before he made a little trip into the town. They would discuss together what he would do, how many nights he would stay in his apartment, what purchases and little luxuries he should acquire. But now she didn’t even know when he had gone. His chair would be empty at breakfast, or she would see his motorcar vanishing down the drive, and then a few days later he would return just as unexpectedly, looking bland and smug and wearing that ridiculous green uniform she hated so much.

“The costume of the vulgarians!” she shouted at him one Sunday when he wore it to lunch, deliberately to affront Eva and her children, she supposed. “We are aristocrats! We do not ally ourselves with upstarts and bullies.”

He gave her a curious, secretive look, a look that she remembered seeing on his face when he had returned from the Serbian front twenty-eight years ago.

“The uniform of a new Hungary, Mama,” he taunted. “A new, refined, strong Hungary.”

Her friends ceased to visit them any more and she tried to pretend that it was because she was old, infirm, tied by arthritis to the life of a semi-invalid. Her friends did not wish to disturb her gentle life with their presence. But as the months passed she confessed bitterly to herself that it was because of Felix that they did not come. The old nobility despised the Arrow Cross men. It was considered bad taste to be a fascist, and because they did not wish to insult an old friend, they just removed their presence from her life.

What had happened to Felix? she asked herself tiredly. Why had he changed? When had he changed? She couldn’t remember, could place no mark on a time when suddenly he had been this instead of that. After the first war? Yes, he had been strange then, and Eva had helped to restore him to normality. His unfortunate marriage? Perhaps, but he had seemed happy enough, restoring the mansion to its previous splendour, giving parties and receptions, flirting with his sister-in-law. Or were the seeds of corruption—for as such she now recognized it—deeper in the past, in his childhood, in the very genes he had inherited from his father? Waves of despair, hatred, resentment washed over her even after all these years. He, that other Felix, had been handsome, charming, ebullient, and he had hidden his nasty, guilty secrets away, just like her son was doing now.

She had a single guideline to salvation, a hope for the future that was none of her contrivance and yet was her hold on sanity—she and the Kaldy land had an heir. George was young and strong and healthy, and he was the recipient of all her love, all her hopes and loyalty. George was uncomplicated, an extrovert who accepted with boyish interest, but not boyish greed, that one day all the land would be his. She rejoiced more and more in her grandchildren. Terez was not the son of the house, but she brought strength and light into the manor which sometimes grew dark and gloomy even on the brightest summer days. Her only regret about her grandchildren was that they were not more
hers.
She had tried many times to persuade Adam to let them stay alone in the manor with her—in that way she could teach them to revere their land, instruct them how to behave as Kaldys—but Adam never allowed them to be alone with her. They always came together, the four of them, and for a long time she had raged at Adam, frustrated by his silent obstinacy. Did he think that she, Luiza Kaldy, was incapable of rearing a son of the house in the proper way? Why did he guard his children from her as though she were dangerous, unfit to teach her own grandchildren? But as Felix became more and more estranged from her she forced herself to accept the restrictions imposed upon her relationship with George and Terez. Better an heir of any kind than no son to follow at all.

These two she loved with a righteous pride. These two helped her to forget the bitterness of Felix’s betrayal.

He was rarely home during the weekends when Eva, Adam, and the children came. She noticed how careful he was to avoid meeting them, even his brother, and when she reproached him for avoiding his family he screamed—really screamed—at her.

“My
family! How dare you say that? She is corrupt and decadent, and her children are like her! She has defiled our family. She has turned the Kaldys into a tainted breed!”

“Out! Out!” she had screamed back. “Out! Until you can remember who you are and not disgrace your name by behaving like the rabble you mix with!”

Old and infirm as she was, she had still been able to quell him... just. She was still Luiza Kaldy, powerful, strong, with a will dominant enough to cow anyone who defied her. But the strength was fading. When he had left the room, scowling and sullen, her limbs had sagged and she had felt a terrible erratic pounding in her heart that had frightened her badly. Was she going to die before seeing George safely into his place at the head of her table?

Felix had returned later, humble, penitent, asking forgiveness the way his father would have done years ago. But he could not win her any more. He was not the only love in her life, for now she had young George.

She found herself less and less able to control Felix, and once or twice she found, to her amazement, that she was slightly afraid of him. Towards the beginning of March, 1944, there was a new, dangerous air about him, a concealed triumph, something secret and gloating that she did not like. He spent much time upstairs in his study, a room her legs would no longer carry her to, and at night she could see under her door a crack of light that showed down the staircase. He was doing something up there, something secretive and evil. She was sure it was evil, but what?

One evening a party of men came to the manor, five men all in the hated green shirts of the Arrow Cross. She was in the hall when they came. She spent more and more time in her wheelchair in the hall, hoping by positioning herself at the centre of the house to keep control over everything happening there. Tamas, the servant who opened the door, was bewildered by the menacing group outside. He looked towards her with uncertainty in his face and she propelled the chair nearer the door.

“Ask them what they want here,” she told the nervous Tamas. “Ask them what they want, and then tell them we are not at home to visitors.”

Her voice was clearly audible to the men outside, as she intended it to be, and she heard a murmured angry response from them. But before Tamas could close the door Felix, running down the stairs, cried, “It’s all right, Tamas. They are friends. They have come to see me.”

Furious, she swung her chair to intercept him before he could get to the door. “I will not have these
peasants
in my house!” she snarled. “I’ve told you before: what disgrace you bring on our name outside the estate I can do little about, but here, in my house, we will entertain only gentlemen.”

Felix’s face was blank, the eyes opaque. “But dearest Mama,” he whispered softly, “you are forgetting that this is not your house. It is my house. Open the door, Tamas!”

The door swung wide, pushed from outside, and the grinning green-shirts stepped inside, lounging against the wall hangings, the ornate balustrades, filling up her elegant great sweep of hall with their vulgar shapeless bodies. Fury raged in her, fury made impotent by the curse of the wheelchair, by her body no longer able to be used as a weapon. They were pigs! Only to look at them proved they were pigs, fat and vulgar. Three of them, staring insolently at her, had not even bothered to remove their caps. She wanted to scream, but she controlled herself. She was still mistress of this house and still had sufficient authority to send them away. She drove her chair to the bottom of the wide staircase and turned to face them.

“You will have to excuse me, gentlemen. I am no longer well enough to receive visitors in my house. You will have to postpone your visit to my son indefinitely. Good evening.” Her voice had the old icy tone that had quelled so many people in the past. None of the men moved, although one tittered derisively and nudged his companion.

Felix smiled at her. It’s going to be all right, she thought with relief. My son will do as I bid him. The men will go away now. Then Felix placed his hand on the back of her chair and slid it along the floor, out of the way of the stairs.

“Go to bed, Mama!” he said slyly. “We have much work to do. Go to bed.”

They pushed past, ignoring her, and followed Felix up the stairs, leaving her in a welter of rage, screaming rage that was also tinged with something else, the first threads of fear that came from recognizing her own helplessness.

She did not go to bed. She could not. She sat in the room that had once been the downstairs small drawing-room and was now her sitting-room, and she listened to the murmur of male voices and an occasional burst of humourless laughter. She smelt massed cigarette smoke, saw Tamas take up brandy and glasses, and her rage abated and her fear grew. She waited until they had gone, and then she thrust out into the hall again, intercepting Felix before he could return to his study. His study? It was his father’s study and now he was defiling it.

“Why did those men come here?”

“Because I invited them,” he answered smoothly. “We had much business—planning—to do.”

“What business? What planning?” Trying hard not to scream but hating him because he was keeping something evil from her.

His face assumed the smug, complacent look she was coming to dread so much. “You will know soon, Mama,” he gloated. “Soon you and all of Hungary will know.”

“I want to know now!” she screamed, and he stared again, then turned his back and began very slowly to climb the stairs.

“Tell me!” she screamed again, but he didn’t even turn, and she saw him enter the study—her husband’s study!—and close the door.

Three days later, when the Germans had marched in, she knew what the meeting had been about. She knew, and her shame was so great she couldn’t look at him or speak to him. She lay on her bed, unable to move herself and unwilling to have Hermin lift her into the chair. She lay there for several days, brooding, worrying, using her bright and active mind to unravel the sinister mystery of her son.

He came to her at last, the old charming Felix, concerned and not a little worried about her physical condition. He brought her tray in himself. There were roses by her plate—he must have telephoned into town to have them sent up—and he was quite his old winning, loving self.

“Darling Mama! You must try to eat something! If you can eat then you will be strong enough to get up. It is very lonely without you. Your Felix wants to see you about, as you have always been. I do not want you to be ill.”

“What have you been doing, upstairs in that room? What has been going on up there, Felix?”

“I have been busy, my darling Mama,” he said with exquisite charm. “We have had a great deal of work to do, and soon I must go into town. But I want you to be a little better before I go. I am worried to see you like this.”