Csardas (81 page)

The door of his neat, bare room was flung open and young Nicky, red-faced and out of breath, hurtled in. “We have a letter from Uncle Adam, Janos! He’s alive, and he thinks Terez and George and Aunt Eva are alive too!”

“I have told you to knock, Nicky,” he said mildly. “You have no right to enter other people’s rooms like that.”

The boy flinched and rapidly blinked his eyes. His thin wrists sticking out from the sleeves of his too-short coat twisted and he slumped a little, embarrassment in every gawky angle of his body.

Janos shared his humiliation, partly from empathy and partly from memories of his own rejections, and said quickly, “It doesn’t matter. I’m very pleased to see you and I am pleased to know that Mr. Kaldy—your uncle—is safe.”

“Uncle Adam says that Terez and her mother and brother escaped before the Gestapo came. He says they are near Magyarovar with your sister!”

“One of my sisters. The first sister they lived with was in the north.”

Nicky glared at him. “They’ve been with your sisters all the time and you didn’t tell me?”

“No.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Supposing you had been caught by the Gestapo, Nicky?” he asked gently, and watched the changing thoughts fleet across the boy’s face: anger, insecurity, pride, and finally hopelessness.

“You are right, of course,” he said at last. He slumped across the room, bumping awkwardly into the wooden rail at the foot of the bed and then tripping—on nothing—and overbalancing onto it “I wouldn’t have been brave enough to keep silent. I would have betrayed them. And your sisters too.” A failure, a coward, the Judas of his family. Then he looked up and smiled. “You looked after me very well when I was hiding, didn’t you, Janos? You thought of things like that. I wouldn’t have thought of that.”

The implosion of pleasure and pain again. He had never intended, never wanted, to let anyone be in a position to cause him pain again, and now this gawky adolescent whom he had protected for eight months had become his friend, had made him vulnerable once more. He felt irritated with himself. He should have seen what was happening and used his intellect to guard his emotions as he had on previous occasions when someone threatened to come close. Because the boy had been helpless, afraid, and above all (oh, how well he understood!) nearly insane with worry about his mother, he had allowed a bond to form, a giving and a taking that held them together. And if he was honest he had to admit that it had begun even before he had found Nicky hiding in the derelict yard. It had begun on the day his mother and aunt had brought him to Janos’s room. The misery had begun then, when he watched the boy and his mother and had been reminded of another child with a similar obsession.

And perhaps the roots of the disease went even deeper. It was the family, this particular Ferenc-Kaldy-Racs-Rassay family which he hated but which fascinated and absorbed him. Only this family could have produced a child capable of twisting into the soft underbelly of Janos Marton.

He could have friends now if he wished—unlike the earlier years of his misplacement between two societies—friends who shared his intellectual exercises and admired his achievements. But he had learned, at school and at college and at his uncle, the shoemaker’s, to manage without friends. He had been rejected then; now, without bitterness, he in turn rejected. He had sisters, but he was just as isolated from them as he was from his colleagues. They were awed and a little afraid of him. His sister near Magyarovar had worn her best dress every time he visited her, and once she had almost called him excellency. He didn’t belong to his family any more. They didn’t want him other than as a totem, a symbol of their superiority over the other simple people about them. Once the isolation had been accepted, the condition of belonging neither to one world nor the other had been absorbed, he had discovered that he could manage without family and without friends, that indeed one was stronger without these encumbrances. And then Nicholas Rassay had needed help and suddenly he had found the old remembered craving back in his heart—the need for warmth and intimacy, for love to be both given and received. He had discovered that there were no barriers between him and this child because their conditioning had been the same, isolated from school friends and at the same time separated by circumstances from their own backgrounds. And Nicky had found the same refuge from bastardy as had Janos from poverty, a fierce possessive clinging to his mother.

Their hardening process had been the same, their escape hatch identical, but Nicky had the final and ultimate lesson to learn, the one that refined and hardened and threw out the polished mould of a man. He had to accept the maiming blow of his mother’s death.

“They’ll come back—to our house—as soon as they can,” Nicholas was saying. “Uncle Adam believes they are alive and so do I. They are
all
alive, I know they are.”

“Nicky—”

“They’re alive! All of them!”

Janos remained silent. The lesson was something you could not teach anyone, or even prepare them for. Nicky had to learn this one all on his own. He gazed at the boy and under the thoughtful blue eyes. Nicky grew uncomfortable. He fidgeted slightly on the bed.

“Don’t you want to know if your sister near Magyarovar is safe?” Nicky asked finally.

“Yes.”

Nicky was suddenly off the bed, bounding across the room like a young dog. “Then can’t you go to see her?
You
could get passes to travel, Janos! You’re important, a hero! And the Russians respect you and let you do all kinds of things that we can’t do. They’d give you passes to get to Magyarovar, I know they would!”

“I can’t possibly go to Magyarovar.” His voice was cold because he was afraid. Nicky was making him become involved with people again.

“Why can’t you? Please, Janos!” Nicky drew breath and then began to speak quietly, controlling himself and trying to talk as an adult instead of an adolescent. “You have done so much for me that I know I have no right to ask more. But I am asking more because I cannot think of anything else. Every night I try to imagine what has happened to them: my cousins, Aunt Malie and Uncle David, my mama. And now Uncle Adam says Terez may be safe! That is why I ask you to go to Magyarovar—please, please, dear Janos! I will do anything for you if you will go and find them!” Young, demanding, proud in so many ways, but not yet proud enough.

“How can I find them?” he asked, suddenly angry. “You know what the country is like. You know what this town is like. How can I find them?” His composure had vanished and he had forgotten how to be impersonal. The judgment that he brought to everything had been destroyed in a sea of panic. Nicholas was hugging his arm, gazing at him with huge pleading eyes. This close he could see just how thin and ill the boy looked. The veins were visible under his skin and there was a transparent appearance about him.

“You don’t have to go around looking,’’ Nicky said humbly. “I know you can’t do that with the Russians there. But if you just went to your sister’s and asked what had happened to them—”

“I can’t go!” he shouted. “You must ask someone else. Your Uncle Leo, ask him to go.”

“Uncle Leo wouldn’t get papers quickly enough; he’s not as important as you. You’ll get everything. They’ll let you use the trains and probably give you rides in their trucks. And if—if they are in trouble with the Russians, Uncle Leo would only make it worse. He would lose his temper and begin fighting. Please, Janos.” The boy’s hands pressed hard into his arm. “I would do it for you,” he said simply. “If you wanted me to go to Magyarovar and look for your sister, I would go.” He smiled again, that warm endearing smile that twisted into the breast and hurt. “I would go. Because you are my friend and I love you.”

Janos closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. “I cannot go,” he muttered, knowing that already it was too late. Whatever he did, whether he went or not, the pain was there and would remain. And because he was a rational man and did not believe in wasting energy in futile effort, he gave in, opened his eyes, and said coldly, “Very well, Nicky. If I can get passes and papers

I will go.”

The smile exploded over the boy’s face again. The hands gripping his arm hugged and pulled. “Thank you, Janos! Thank you!”

Janos pulled his arm away and stood up. For a moment he hated Nicky. He was disturbed and unsettled. His calm, abstract pattern for the future had been destroyed and Nicky must be punished.

“Go home,” he said curtly.

“You’re not angry with me, are you?”

“I’ve told you to go home.”

Uncertainty on his face, Nicky took a step towards the door. “I’m sorry, Janos. If you really cannot go—”

“I’ve told you I will go to Magyarovar. I have also told you to leave here.”

Tears stood in the boy’s eyes (yes, there had been a time when he too would have cried over such a rejection). Janos turned away and picked up a book from his desk, any book. It was his volume of verse, the poetry that he had written just before and after his mother’s death, and quickly he put the book down again. He heard the door close and footsteps on the stairs. The implosion of pleasure that marked Nicky’s coming was now matched by an explosion of misery. He held his body rigidly controlled for a moment and then rushed across to the window and threw it open.

“Nicky!”

The figure just emerging onto the road looked up.

“Good-bye, Nicky,” he shouted.

There was a pause, then a nervous smile appeared on the upturned face.

“Good-bye, Nicky,” he shouted again, and the nervousness disappeared. Nicky waved up at him and began to walk away. He looked back, waved again, tripped over nothing, and faded into the distance, a tall, gangling youth who had not yet learned how to live alone.

A hundred times during the journey to Magyarovar he cursed himself for surrendering to emotional involvement. He was an important man and he had urgent and difficult matters to attend to; instead he was rattling 200 kilometres across the country on a fool’s errand searching for three people for whom he cared nothing, just because a boy had made the very worst kind of sentimental appeal to him. He was angry, but he was sensible enough to admit that he could blame no one but himself for his irrational behaviour.

The journey would have taken less than a day including changes before the war, but now it took him three days to get there. Bridges had been destroyed, tracks blown up, and the Russians inspected passes and issued delaying instructions at every station and checkpoint.

Hungarians had been forbidden to use railway stations, and although his pass gave him a dispensation, he thought it safer not to wait around at night when trains were unlikely to run. It was warm and he spent one night curled against his rucksack in a field of grass—grass was all that was left anywhere this spring—and another night sleeping in an ammunition train waiting for the morning departure. As he moved west the evidences of war were more prevalent, for as the Germans had been pushed back against the Austrian border, they had tried, once more, to launch delaying tactics. With only one more country, one more border before the Russians were on German soil, pockets of resistance had tried to hold for a few days. He learned that the German garrison had been cleared from Magyarovar on April 3 and that the town was still in post-battle chaos. The train was halted some 20 kilometres outside and soldiers began to unload ammunition. He was offered a ride in a jeep into Magyarovar but decided that from this distance it would be easier to walk across country direct to his sister’s village. His sister had married well—all his sisters had married well—to a landed peasant with a small but fertile patch; at least it had been fertile once. Now, as he looked about him, he supposed it would be like anywhere else, stripped, unsown, and devoid of cattle. So much to do, so much to do....

The last time he had visited here the fields had been full of sunflowers, moving their great dinner-plate heads round to gaze at the sun, a good rich crop of seed and oil. He was still, for all his early exile from the country, a child of the soil, and as he struck off across the fields he stared down at the ground, hoping that perhaps some of the flowers had seeded themselves for this year. There had been fighting in Magyarovar and, inevitably, some evidence had carried over into the surrounding countryside: an abandoned tank, a crater in a field, a bombed farmhouse. These things were nothing compared to the neglected fields, the lack of cattle, the things that meant no food next winter. What was he doing trekking across the country looking for the wife and children of his old master when he should be at home, trying to plan how they were going to cope with the bad months that lay ahead?

Madame Kaldy—the young Madame Kaldy—Terez, George: what were they to him? They were not the same people that young Nicky described to him, for Nicky had created an image of a pretty, silly, rather sharp-tempered Aunt Eva that bore no resemblance at all to the languid, distant lady he remembered from his youth. He could recall her sitting on the veranda, sipping juice from a long glass, playing tennis in a white dress, or alighting from a car or carriage carrying parcels and smelling of city perfume. Terez he could remember, a jovial baby up at the farm whom he once prevented from falling into the river and, after that, a schoolgirl who always smiled when they met in the town and said, “Good morning, Janos Marton,” making it plain that in spite of the age difference, and the fact that he was a schoolteacher, she still considered him the Marton boy from her father’s estate. George was a schoolboy whom he knew only by sight. What were these people to him? Why had he come to look for them?

During the months that Nicky was in hiding, the boy had talked incessantly of his family, relating stories and family jokes. At first he had listened because he could not be cruel. And then, in spite of himself, he had become fascinated by the incredible descriptions that in no way matched up to his memories of the amoebic country family. Uncle Adam—who had set the
pandur
to beat the truth out of his father—a dull, fair, and kindly man? Uncle Leo—that weak, over-emotional pseudo-liberal—a brave and adventurous rebel? Nicky’s mother, Kati Racs-Rassay—a timid mouse who had disgraced her family—a brilliant, talented cosmopolitan? And so it went on, the people whom Janos had watched from childhood, watched fascinated because they had lifted him from his world in a careless amused way just as they put out crumbs for birds or fed stray dogs, revealed as many-faceted humans, not gods to be hated or revered. There was only one where Nicky’s description matched his own recollection, “Aunt Malie.” He too remembered her as kindly, gentle, concerned; even that time she had visited him, accusing him of being in league with the Germans and Arrow Cross, even then he had recognized her gentleness. But of the others, none were the same.