Csardas (86 page)

He sat, not answering, disgusted with himself. How pretty she was, how bright and cheerful—no problem of rejection or insecurity—how very much like Nicky.

‘“How is your cousin?” he asked abruptly. “How is young Nicky?”

“He’s resting, like your doctor told him to. He lies in bed all the time and we’ve asked Papa to try and send some fresh food down from the farm if he can.”

“It would be better if he went and stayed on the farm. He needs to rest where the air is good.”

Terez stopped chewing, and her eyes clouded a little. “He doesn’t want to go. He gets agitated every time we mention it and makes himself ill—his temperature rises and he doesn’t sleep. Uncle Leo and I thought it better that he stays.”

“He’s waiting for his mother to come home,” Janos said slowly.

Terez nodded, staring agreement at him. How huge her eyes were, how soft, like Nicky’s.

“Why are your clothes so old-fashioned?” he heard himself asking, and then was shocked—shocked because he had asked so personal a question and shocked because it had obviously upset her. A flush spread up from the lace collar and she put a hand up and straightened it needlessly. “I’m sorry,” he said, flustered. “It was impertinent of me. I should not have asked.”

“They’re my Aunt Malie’s old clothes cut down,” she answered, looking down at the table. “They’re very old—it’s the best Mama could find. I lost my clothes when we went to Magyarovar, and when I came back all my old things were too small.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“I expect I look very funny.”

“You look beautiful!”

She was as astonished as he was.

For a moment they stared at each other across the table, too stunned to say anything more. And then, “Excuse me,” and he rose stiffly from the chair. “I must return to my office.”

Back in his cool, safe office, with the telephones and the tray of Party papers and the files of everything that had happened in the town, he drew a deep, tranquillizing breath and determined never to speak to her again. When he walked across to the window she was still there—it was 1:15; she would be late!—and when she finally rose and walked back across the square she stopped briefly and stared straight up at his window. She raised her hand in a shy, half movement of acknowledgment, and fully intending not to, he found that he had answered her salute with a wave of his own hand. It was the summer, and the fact that she looked like young Nicky and wore a dress with a lace collar that the sunlight turned to yellow.

Everyone looked strange and shabby that year. Clothes had been destroyed, stolen, and had worn out, and there were no more. Occasionally you saw a smart, well-dressed woman, but always she was with a Russian officer or in a café with fat men exchanging wallets of mixed currency. Everyone else was worn, tired, and dingy. Women who had been elegant before the war looked like peasants, and peasants looked like beggars.

Leo, trudging home from the printer’s on a hot September afternoon, wished he still had some of the lightweight alpaca suits, flannel trousers, and canvas shoes of pre-war summers. He was all right. He had a suit—he had found it in the Arrow Cross man’s apartment—but it was thick winter-weight and even without the jacket, just wearing the trousers as he was now, it made him feel heavy and lethargic.

Mustn’t complain, he thought to himself. How lucky I am, how lucky. He watched an old woman in front of him and thought how hot she too must be, wearing a man’s army greatcoat tied round the waist with string and a shapeless black beret on her head. She looked like a beggar but was probably, he reflected sadly, a peasant or smallholder who had lost everything in the war. She had a bundle—black cotton—that was dragging on the ground beside her. Thin wisps of white hair frayed out from the pulled-down beret.

The war... the war. That is how we all look, how we all feel, he thought tiredly. She’s worse than some of us, but not really. We’re all like that inside.

The sight of her dragging along suddenly depressed him and he turned his head away and rushed past her. Repeatedly he found himself unable to believe in the new wonderful Hungary that was going to emerge. There were too many people like the old beggar woman, too many untilled fields, too many wrecked factories, mutilated families. How could any kind of phoenix arise from ashes like these?

He hurried home, nearly racing, until the sweat ran down his face to lie in thick salty patches around the inside of his collar. Get away from them all—from the newspaper, from poverty, from the shouted unrest of the world—get home to where he was cocooned for a while with people he knew and loved.

As he opened the door he could hear, whining down the stairs from the upper apartment, the complaining voice of Eva. He screwed his eyes into a grimace of pain, leant against the door and sighed. It had been many years since he had spent any length of time with Eva, since he had gone to Berlin, in fact, and he found it hard to reconcile the transformation of Eva the girl, vivacious if a little spoilt and sharp, to the whining, querulous woman who now filled the apartment. The war again... the war had done this to her.

He was still leaning against the door when someone knocked on the outside. It was so unexpected it made him jump away, swearing crossly at yet another irritant in the hot day. When he opened it the old beggar woman was standing there. She’s followed me all the way home, he thought angrily. Someone to beg from. I look as though I’m rich so she thinks she can come here and ask for food and clothing. He glared at the greatcoat tied up with string, at the feet breaking out of a pair of cracked shoes, at the lined walnut face with a complexion as weathered and rubbery as a man’s.

“Yes?”

She stared at him, not speaking, but with her lower jaw working and her face breaking down into a welter of ridges and lines. Something cold moved in his stomach.

“What do you want?”

A croak that sounded like a word emerged. The terrible face moved and writhed again, toothless, but even in ugliness growing increasingly familiar, frighteningly familiar. And then—

“Leo,” the face said finally. “Leo... Leo... Leo...” and the old woman stretched her hand out and touched his shoulder.

“Oh, my God!” he whispered. “Is it you, Malie? Is it you?”

She nodded. That was all, just nodded. She didn’t touch him again, or try to come in. The hand that was holding the bundle curled tighter round the cloth.

Malie, bending over his bed with a napkin of delicacies stolen from a party.
...
Malie with her shoes and stockings off, paddling in a mountain stream with a young hussar officer.
...
Malie laughing, running through the acacia woods in a soft lawn dress.
...

“Malie!” he cried, tears and sweat breaking out together all over his body. “Oh, my God! Malie, Malie!” She stumbled over the step, the terrible face still moving, and he threw back his head and screamed, “It’s Malie! It’s Malie!” and then he pressed his face into the door and groaned, feeling such anguish and pain that he wanted to hurt himself, bang his head against the door until his senses became dead, obliterated in physical sensation.

Nobody heard. Surprisingly nobody heard. Eva’s voice whined on and no sounds of movement came from upstairs. He sobbed into the door and then felt the old woman’s hand on his shoulder again.

“Leo.” The voice was the same, soft, gentle, the voice of Malie, his beloved and beautiful sister, and the voice destroyed all the fear and shock. He drew her into his arms, his heart filling with shame, swelling with pain. She was tiny now, his big sister was a little old woman, and gently, gently, he rocked her to and fro, crooning as though she were a child.

“Malie, Malie.” The smell of old clothes and dust and malnutrition. The feel of a small body, knotted with swollen joints, destroyed. What had they done to her? “Oh, God, Malie! My dearest, darling Malie! You’ve come home. You’ll be safe now. You’re home with your Leo and we’ll never let you go away again.”

He took the beret from her head. Thin, sawn-off hair, dirty white.
Malie with her brown hair piled high for a party, then falling round her shoulders when she came to say good night
....

“Leo, my sons—have my sons come home?”

“No, darling,” he wept. “No, no.”

“Karoly? Jacob?”

“No, darling! No!”

“Have you heard? Has anyone sent news?”

“No, Malie. No news.”

“Aaiee!” her head tilted back, eyes closed, mouth open, and she began to weep. “Aaiee! Aaiee!”

He could feel the pain of sobbing deep down in her body and he held her close, rocking and soothing. “Hush, Malie. Hush, my darling!”
Malie, the young matron, stately, smiling, presiding over her husband’s table in a green silk dress.
...

He found they were sitting on the bottom stair and through the open door he could see into the courtyard—the sun pouring down onto the stones, the dust piled thickly where no one had had time to sweep. It was hours since he had walked through the courtyard and opened the door, hours.

“Hush, Malie. Quiet now. You are home, home with your family.”

“Who?” she whispered at last. “Who has come home?”

“Eva is safe, and Adam and the children—George and Terez. And young Nicky.”

She nodded slowly, with sad but fatalistic acceptance. “Nicky, yes. How pleased Kati would be, to know her Nicky survived.”

He had to know—to learn what had happened to the others, to her. She was old and tired and should be put to bed, but before the family came down he had to know.

“What happened to you?” he asked hoarsely. “To you and David and Mama and Papa. All of you?”

“You know what happened, Leo,” she breathed, staring out into the sunlight in a queer disorientated way. “Everyone knows what happened.”

“Where are the others?” Her face screwed into pain again.

“Dead, all except my sons.” Her eyes opened suddenly and entreated Leo. “If you have heard nothing, perhaps my sons are still alive!”

“Perhaps, Malie,” he said heavily.

“I saw Jacob,” she said, staring at nothing. “When we were going into Auschwitz, we saw men in prison clothes working on the electric cables. And Kati pulled me and said, ‘Look, there is Jacob.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘Jacob is in Germany. They took him straight to Germany.’ But Kati is sure it is Jacob. I shout to him and the S.S. guard with the dog tells me he will set the dog on me if I shout again. I say to him, ‘What sort of man are you? That is my son! Have you no feelings? You do not have a mother?’ I shout again and Jacob calls to me, ‘Go on, you will be all right.’” She stopped, and her hands dropped suddenly in front of her, down between her knees, and she stared at them.

“What happened, Malie?”

“What?” She looked at him, uncomprehending. “That is all.”

“What happened to Mama and Papa, to David, Kati, and all the others from the town?”

“Dead. Now I know they are dead. At the time I thought we were divided for different reasons: health, or for baths. Mama, Papa, David—they were sent away. Too old, you see? Kati and I—they kept us, first to Bergen Belsen, and then to the factory... Germany.”

“And Kati? What happened to Kati?”Malie stared into the air again. “She stole a tin of meat.”

“Yes?”

“Kati is dead.”

“Are you sure of this, Malie? Because of Nicky, you must be sure.”

“Kati is dead,” she said tonelessly.

He could ask her no more, but already he was thinking about the next thing that would happen. Nicky. Nicky would want to know if—how his mother had died.

“Malie, listen to me.” He took her hands between his and tried to infuse steadfastness into her body with his eyes and hands. “Nicky is very ill. He has tuberculosis and he must rest all the time and not be upset. He refuses to believe his mother is dead; he has been convinced, right from the beginning, that she would come back here. Malie, are you listening?”

She was. At last he knew he had her attention; she had begun to listen to him at some point after he said Nicky was ill.

“Malie, if you know how Kati died—and if it was bad—I beg you not to tell Nicky.”

“She was beaten to death by the woman S.S. guard,” Malie said dully.

He gripped her hands again and whispered, “Malie, you have suffered so much. It is cruel to ask you to have to pretend, to make up lies to protect others, but tell Nicky his mother died... easily. Later, when he is cured, you can speak the truth.”

“What can I say?” she cried. “What can I tell him that will make it any better? What can I say to any of them?”

“Nothing, my darling. I will tell them. I will tell them everything.”

“Yes, yes!” she began to cry again. “I’m so tired, Leo, so very tired...”

“I will say to Nicky that his mother died of a heart attack—at night—and you were with her. She didn’t wake and it was over in a second. All you have to do is say yes when Nicky asks you if it was so. That is all.”

She nodded, crying quietly into her hands. He kissed her, stroked her, fondled the sparse hair and the coarse-grained skin of her neck.

“I want you to wait here, Malie,” he whispered. “Just for one moment while I go and prepare them. Then you can go to bed. We will make some water hot for you to bathe, and you will sleep.”

She was slumped against the wall as he pushed past, up the stairs, with a heavy heart. The happiness of Malie’s return was tempered by her ravaged body and by the news she had brought with her.

Later, when the evening of gladness and sorrow had passed, when Nicky and Malie had been talked away into sleep and when everyone else—shocked, stunned, tearful, afraid—had finally been tired into silence, he lay on his bed, closed his eyes, and tried not to see the memories that Malie had given him.

She lay on her bed for a long time, staring up at the ceiling and then turning her face into the pillow and weeping. They could hear her all over the apartment when she wept. It was terrible and it was worse when it happened at night. It didn’t sound like a woman crying, it was like the noise of an animal in pain.

Within a few days of her return the old women began knocking on the door, dreadful old women with ravaged faces and stained hands. “Did you see my sister? My brother? My parents? My child? What happened to the Maryk family, to the Jacobys, the Kohns?” Old women who all looked the same, who had huge eyes and trembling mouths. And every time they came Malie would drag herself from the bed and sit quietly, listening to names and descriptions, shaking her head. “No, no, I didn’t see them, I don’t know what happened to him—” and on one occasion, after a pause, “She is dead. I know that one is dead.”