Csardas (83 page)

“Janos, will we be able to get home?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me again about Nicky, and Uncle Leo, and my papa.”

He was tired, but he went through it all again, sensing through the darkness her need to picture them back at home. She didn’t ask about the others, the ones who hadn’t come back yet, although he knew they were there in her mind. When he had finished telling of her papa and Unce Leo and cousin Nicky, she sighed and then reached out and took his hand. “How kind you have been to us all, Janos Marton,” she whispered. “How very kind. Whatever happens to us you will always be my friend and I shall never forget you.”

Young Nicky, and now Terez. He was becoming enmeshed in sickly bourgeois sentiment made worse because of his own emotional weakness.

The journey back, which took eight days, assumed at times the proportions of a nightmare. The biggest of their difficulties was Eva Kaldy. He could—and did—cope with the Russians, with breakdowns of trains, with the lack of food, and with official red tape that dogged them all the way. But Eva Kaldy made him lose the steeled control it had taken him years to acquire. Once he nearly placed his hands round her still surprisingly fat neck and squeezed. He and Terez quarrelled bitterly about her, and during the course of the eight days he ceased trying to be polite to the old woman; he shouted, ignored, and swore when he felt it would release the pentup hatred and frustration that she fermented inside him.

On the first morning he had applied to the commander of the village for permission to take the three Kaldy refugees back with him. He had stressed his party function and had indicated that these three were important—they had special information about Arrow Cross activities and could denounce hidden fascists. He hated himself for resorting to such blatant propaganda methods—and for such a purpose!—but after several hours of waiting, arguing, persuasion, and a personal examination of the three by a Russian lieutenant, he had been given passes beginning 20 kilometres away, at the same point where he had been put off the train. They had to get there by themselves and then, if they were lucky, they might find a place on a train going somewhere towards the east.

He had made a stretcher with two uneven bars of wood and the blanket. George, when lifted on to it, had groaned and then fainted. Fortunately, for most of that long, jolting trek across cart tracks and shell-pocked roads he had remained unconscious.

He didn’t even have to ask Terez if she was strong enough to bear the other end. She had already bundled up her few belongings and stationed herself at the foot of the makeshift stretcher. Then she looked from him to her mama, who was sitting crying quietly in the broken chair.

“How do we persuade her to walk, Janos?” she asked.

“She not only has to walk, she has to carry your bundle and my rucksack. So, Madame Kaldy, we are leaving now. We have to walk for the first part of the journey and then, with fortune, we shall be able to find a place on a train.”

“You must leave me.” Eva sniffed. “I am a sick and crippled woman. Those Russians—what they did to me. No one will ever understand. Go and leave me.”

“Don’t be silly, Mama,” Terez said irritably. “You know we shouldn’t leave you. But we cannot carry both you and George—and George is sick.”

“And I? Your mother who has suffered at the hands of those beasts? I am not sick? I am a well and healthy woman?”

“No, Mama.” Terez sighed. “We none of us are well. But we are better than poor George. Come now, you must try. Put the rucksack and bundle on your back—I will help you—and then try to walk with us.”

“Carry those things!” shrieked Eva. “How can I carry anything when I can scarcely move my legs?”

That was the first time he wanted very badly to hit her, but instead he had gone outside and waited, fighting for control and trying not to hear the persuasions and plaintive replies coming from the other side of the wall.

“Come now, dearest Mama. Just stand and try to walk a little way with me supporting you. Once you have your legs working you will see it is easy. Come now, a little practice and then away we can go, back home. See? It is easy!” And then a small cry of misery and anger. “Oh, Mama!”

“I told you, I am a weak and injured creature. Helpless. You must leave me. Take my son home but leave me here.”

“Oh, Mama!” He could hear the frustration and tears in Terez’s voice and suddenly he could bear no more. He stepped over the wall and and walked to the stretcher.

“Your mama is right, Terez. We must leave her.”

“Janos!”

“If she wants to walk, she will. All she has to do is pick up those bundles and come with us. That is all. We can waste no more time. Take the other end of the stretcher, please, Terez.”

“Janos, we cannot.”

“Do not argue!” he shouted, and stared at the old lady who wasn’t an old lady at all. “You’re a vulture, Madame Kaldy,” he shouted, “living on the flesh of your children. Why I am wasting my time with you when Hungary is full of good, strong, worthy people who need to be saved, I cannot think! We are going now, taking your son home to where he can see a doctor and be cared for. If you want to come, get up and walk and bring those bundles with you. Because if you do not bring those bundles you will not eat on the journey. And—” He paused, shaking with rage. “If I see that you have left them behind I shall come back here and tie them to you!”

Terez was trembling. She looked at her mother, then at him, and he waved one hand peremptorily at the other end of the stretcher. “I shall lift it onto the wall, then climb over and slide it forward.” He glared at her, daring her to say one word about her mother. “Then you can climb over. Try not to jar him. We shall stop and rest every fifty paces.”

She wasn’t strong enough to carry it, but there was no other way. He heard her panting, felt her slowing down, and they had to stop and rest long before fifty paces.

“Just until I get used to it,” she breathed. “I’ll get used to it very soon.” And then she whispered, “Janos, Mama is coming after us.”

“Is she carrying the bags?” he snapped.

“Yes.”

“We’ll continue then.”

It took them two days to get to the rail point, and to their stumbling, halting progress was added the groans of George and a continual litany of whined miseries from Eva Kaldy. Again and again he reproached himself for what he was doing, the energy he was spending on saving this useless piece of humanity who represented everything he had always despised. If he wanted to indulge in nepotism he could have found worthier causes almost anywhere. Anyone was worthier of salvation than this spoilt, hysterical woman who was immersed in her own discomfort.

At the rail point they had to wait several hours, and when the train finally came, Eva, with exceptional agility, sprang aboard just as Janos was trying to slide the stretcher in. She kicked it slightly to one side and George groaned again as his body was jarred. When he finally had the boy settled and was in himself he lay down as far away from her as possible.

“Janos, about Mama, I—”

“I cannot bear to talk about your mother, Terez. She disgusts me.”

Her dirty face crumpled. The huge shadows under her eyes were nearly obliterated by filth but he could still see how tired she was, how her shoulders were hunched forward from the pain of carrying the stretcher.

“You’ve done well, little girl,” he said softly. “You have all the courage your mother has not. I don’t mind what I’m doing when I remember it is for you and for my young friend Nicky.”

She tried to smile but was so tired she failed. He pulled her down beside him and cushioned her head on his arm.

“Try to sleep. This journey will take many hours and we shall have to walk again before we find another train.”

They were both sinking into sleep when he heard the whine, the moaning demand for attention that had grated on his nerves for the last two days.

“Terez. Terez, my baby, help me. Your poor mother is sick.”

“Go to sleep, old woman. Do not disturb us.”

“I’m sick!”

“If you do not stop I shall hit you, old woman.”

She was silent then, so silent he became frightened and finally moved away from the sleeping Terez and crawled over. Eva Kaldy was cushioned against the knapsack, snoring gently, looking stronger and fatter than any of the rest of them.

They jolted, stopped, moved forward, and finally after nearly a day had passed the train came to rest in a siding for the night. They climbed out the following morning and carried the stretcher into the nearest village, where he hoped he might be able to get help. They had left the frontier towns and villages where the fighting had been bad and this far back there had been no total destruction, only the usual deprivations of cattle, women, and wrist watches.

He finally found a farmer who would lend him a hand cart. Anything else would have been useless anyway as there were no horses to pull. The farmer told him that if they could get along the road a few kilometres, to the stone quarry belonging to Geza Gluck, a truck sometimes ran from the quarry to the next rail point. The hand cart was better. He’d become worried about Terez because it was obvious she couldn’t carry her end of the stretcher much longer. They got to the quarry by the road, all three exhausted. He opened his rucksack to divide the last of his bread and sausage and discovered that during the night on the train Eva had eaten everything. That was when he wanted to kill her. His rage mounted so strongly that he had been unable to control himself and he towered over her, shouting and waving the rucksack in her face.

“You deserve to die! You are a fat, greedy sow—but even a sow makes provision for its young! If I had caught you stealing our food I would have killed you, you understand? I would have killed you!”

Eva began to whimper and he felt Terez pulling on his arm. “Janos, don’t,” she whispered. “Leave her. We can buy food in this part of the country. It is not so bad. Leave her.”

“Leave her? I cannot leave her! She is a vulture, a leech, and she deserves to die. All my life I wondered what it must be like to be born a Kaldy or a Ferenc or a Racs-Rassay, and now I have learned what it is like. My own mother—” He choked into silence. What had happened to him, to his control, his self-discipline, his iron rules that nothing and no one ever disturbed? He never spoke of his mother in passion, not to anyone, and now, so overwrought was he, he had nearly shared her with these people, compared her—her loyalty, courage, and sacrifice—with the disgusting, greedy, slug-like thing that sat before him at the side of the road.

“Do not speak to her like that,” Terez cried. “I don’t like it. She is weak and irritating, but don’t talk to her like that.”

“I shall talk any way I like while she hampers us from getting home.”

“You think, just because you are important and some kind of hero, you can treat her as though she is filth!” Terez shouted, crying with anger, tiredness, and also shame, because her mother had disgraced them all. “She is my mother, and I will not have you shout at her or bully her!”

“Then take your brother home by yourself.”

She had tried to strike him, an ineffectual floating blow that died at birth in her weak body. In fury she ran away, into the quarry, and he heard her steps run across the loosened stone.

“Are you satisfied, old bitch!” he snarled at Eva Kaldy, and felt no satisfaction because Eva wasn’t listening, just sitting whining about her feet, the Russians, her sickness, everything.

Later Terez had come back, slipped her hand in his and pressed her forehead against his arm. They could neither of them speak—they were too tired, too strained—but they were friends again, of sorts.

The truck took them into the next village and at last they were able to find a doctor to set George’s leg and confirm that two of his ribs were broken.

“He is sick, very sick. He should not travel when he is like this. He should rest in bed, warm, and with whatever drugs we can find.”

They discussed the matter in detail and finally agreed to stay for a couple of nights, until George was a little better. Again he had to use the power of his Party card to find a bed for the night and he had refused to use it other than for George. He, Terez, and Eva had taken shelter in a barn just outside the town, and he had spent two nights listening to Eva’s reproaches because he had found a bed for her son but not for her. At last, unable to bear it any longer, he moved outside and slept huddled against the barn wall. He was cold, but his spirit was left in peace.

George was really not better on the third day, but he heard there was a train leaving for home sometime during the afternoon. He could wait no longer; he had become obsessed, as they all had, with the belief that once they were home everything would be better. In the morning he and Terez went to visit George. He was weak but lucid. In the mornings his fever seemed to abate. He could recognize them, could smile and talk a little. During the journey he had become to Janos not a person but a stretcher, a burden that had to be lifted, carried, moved at difficult angles over walls, rutted roads, and the edges of cattle cars. But now, as he looked at the boy, he felt a grudging approval for his courage and for his lack of complaint. George and Terez, they were worth saving surely. Somehow the despicable creature left sleeping back in the barn had spawned a pair of changelings. Or perhaps it was just that this new young generation had been tempered by the war. They were no longer Ferencs or Kaldys, no longer to be called excellency or sir. They were “Jews with false papers” and the young ones had grown up with a courage and endurance that commended them to him. Nicky, Terez, George—it was worth saving these three, for they had the iron and the will to help rebuild the new Hungary.

“We are going to try and get on another train today, George,” he said quietly. “This should be the last part of the journey. Do you feel well enough for us to begin again?”

The boy smiled, nodded, said a whispered “thank you,” and then tried to say something else but was too weak and the words died in a sigh. They lifted him back onto the homemade stretcher, watched the blood drain from his face as the movement sent fresh pain through him, and carried him outside the cottage. Janos paid the smallholder with money. The man did not look pleased but it was all Janos had. Money was growing increasingly more useless—a chicken or bag of grain would have been more valuable—and as a sop Janos scribbled a note on a piece of paper commending the man to the authorities for the help he had given to the Party. The smallholder stared dispassionately at the paper but Janos could waste no more time or give anything else.