Csardas (92 page)

She didn’t know how to answer. He was so angry, and she didn’t fully understand his argument anyway.

“You’re all worried about Terez marrying him. She won’t. When she sees what he and the people like him are doing, when her father finally loses his land, then she will understand and hate him.”

“Oh, no, Leo,” she whimpered. “No more hate, no more hate!”

He was sorry. He hurried over and held her in his arms, smoothing her hair and comforting her as best he could. When she was calm again he said, “Malie, in my room is an envelope full of money I have saved during the last year. I shall leave it there when I return to Budapest. It is to be used for you and for Nicky. No one else, you understand?”

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you why. But the money is there.”

“What are you planning, Leo? Please tell me!”

“I can’t, Malie. But I promise no one here will come to any harm. And you must not talk to anyone about the money, or about this conversation.”

She felt the way she had in 1944, afraid, uncertain, but not knowing where to look for the source of her fear. “Don’t do anything foolish,” she begged. “Please, be wise now—you are a man, not a boy. Be sensible.”

“I can’t be sensible any longer, Malie.”

She thought he was going to say something more, but he stopped himself and just gave her another gentle hug. “It will be all right, little Malie. Nothing will happen, I promise you.”

“Why do you have to be so restless, Leo?” she whispered. “Why can you not settle, be content with what is here? If you had married, perhaps.... I don’t know. We always hoped you would marry and be contented.”

“Well, maybe I will. One day, maybe I will.” He would say no more. For the rest of his visit he was gentle and spent his time with her and Nicky. He was pleasant to Terez but her link with Janos had broken the old tie between them. She was no longer his favourite child, and he was no longer her idolized uncle. There was a rift between them.

When he left, Malie knew she wasn’t going to see him again. She knew by the way he held her in his arms and whispered, “Good-bye, little mother. How kind you have been to me always. The one I loved most, better than Mama and Papa or anyone. Good-bye, little Malie.” She tried to speak, to beg him not to do whatever was in his heart, but a sense of futility buried her cry before it was born. He kissed her, then picked up his case and hurried down the stairs. She watched him from her bedroom window, saw his tall frame springing away along the street, and then he had vanished round the corner without once turning round to wave.

The election was a farce; even to unpolitical people like Malie who did not understand, it was a farce. There were those, like herself and Eva, who could not vote at all because there had been a “mistake” and they were not registered where they should be registered. And there were those—mostly in trucks and buses—being driven from poll to poll with green cards that registered them in several places at once. The result, as Leo had predicted, was inevitable. The Party emerged as the single largest group and, without waiting for any niceties of overall majorities, seized power quickly and irrevocably.

One month after the election Janos Marton, white-faced, stern, came to call and report that their brother, Leo Ferenc, was listed as a renegade from the state. He had taken advantage of his first foreign assignment and was now—so it had been reported—on his way to London via Vienna and Paris. If ever he set foot on Hungarian soil again he would be arrested.

While Eva wept, Malie felt only relief. He was safe, alive, and his act of rebellion was so much milder than she had feared.

At night he lay awake, staring at the picture of the stag that hung on his wall and trying to define why he felt unease, why every day brought a fresh disquiet to his work and beliefs. Sometimes, in the shaft of light from the road lamp outside, the stag appeared to move, turn his head a little and gaze longingly at a different angle of the Bukk Mountains, and at those moments Janos would be seized by a longing, long since mastered, for the country of his childhood—the hills and rivers and woods that surrounded the Kaldy land. Here, in this room, he sometimes allowed himself to be nostalgic about the pastoral background of his youth. Sometimes, but not too often. Nostalgia was at best wasteful, at worst dangerous.

He had been offered a different apartment on more than one occasion, one near the town’s main square, a more splendid and luxurious home, a tribute to his place in the local Party hierachy. He had refused. He told himself that it was because that kind of privilege was exactly what he had spent his life fighting. But a deeper truth was that this room had been his oasis for a long time. He had made it what he wanted it to be: plain, unsentimental, pure, a refuge where he cast away the shell of pretence and considered himself and the world as it was.

He tried very hard to see the world as it was, especially now, because he was constantly perturbed about his work and about the work of the Party. The voluntary exile of Leo Ferenc had jarred his pure beliefs—yes, the man was an indulgent romantic, unstable, spoilt, but he had served the Party in his own way for many years, had survived the Horthy persecution, the Nazis, the war. Why did Leo Ferenc choose to exile himself after all this? Was it simply because he was a selfish and frustrated child?

What was it that troubled him; when had his unease begun? He thought back. The days after the war had been courageous and constructive. They had been given a task to do and had done it well. The Party, and no one else, had rebuilt the factories, put industry and government into working order, given the people work and bread. Now, only two and a half years after the war, they could look proudly about them and say,
No one starves; there are no poor; at last after a thousand years there is bread and meat for everyone.
Surely this was enough? This had been his life’s desire—to see that a child ate, that a woman did not die untended, that a man could not be beaten by the
pandur
for no other reason than that he wanted to eat and see his children eat.

Was it the election, the “arranged” election? It had bothered him, but he had considered carefully and realized that the end justified the means. If this was the way it had to be done to ensure that there were no poor, so it must be. Stifling his conscience, he had taken his part in the voting fiasco, keeping his sights firmly on the ultimate aim: a country where no one was poor or hungry or beaten, where the greatest freedom of all prevailed, the freedom of fear from want.

So where did his doubts begin? He could not remember, but now when he walked to his office past the guards at the door he felt unease. When the sealed orders came from Budapest for Comrade Lengyel and no one else, he felt unease. When he was asked for secret reports on the private lives of old comrades like Gabor, he felt unease. Surely these men who had suffered before and during the war for their beliefs could be trusted now? Surely the dignity of privacy could be accorded them?

He drowned the horrifying thought that someone was probably also writing a report on his private life, giving times and details of when the girl, Terez Kaldy, visited his apartment and how long she stayed. He shrank from this thought, recoiled the way he had recoiled all his adult life from any intrusion on his secret self.

She came to his apartment quite openly now, and she stayed for as long as she could. What questions and suffering she endured at home he never asked. The last year had put such a strain on their relationship that at some point the knowledge that she would be labelled as Marton’s whore had ceased to matter. There were so many strains between them, so many things they had to avoid discussing, from Leo’s dismissal as editor to her father’s pathetic attempts to hold his patch of land, that the quiet time of loving each other in his ascetic room was the only thing that gave them hope and reassurance. Several times he tried to break the bond between them, for her sake as well as his. He grew angry when he thought of how loving her had confused his clear-cut path of action. Perhaps that was the cause of his present unease. It was nothing at all to do with the Party; she had destroyed his ability to devote his mind and being to dispassionate reason. And he? What had he done for her? He had never, other than that first time at the Café Moscow, told her he loved her. He never laughed with her or took her to the country or—or brought her roses! She was pretty and young—oh, yes, she was very pretty, soft and gentle and pretty—and there were still enough young men left who came from lives less harsh than his, young men who would be pleasant and easy to be with. They were wrong together, the peasant and the Kaldy daughter. He could not make her happy, and she was pulling him into bourgeois confusion.

All these things he told himself, and he knew all the while that nothing—ever—would make him relinquish her. She was his, irrevocably his. Nothing he could do to her would drive her away. He had been cruel to her, ignored her, given her none of the outward signs and gestures of love, but she had stayed with him, crying sometimes, but always assuring him before she left, “Janos, I love you. I love you so much!”

“Why do you love me?”

‘“Because... I trust you. You are like my father. You would never betray me or lie to me.”

“That is no reason to love me.”

A smile, her small wicked imp’s smile that made him long to be young with her except that he did not know how.

“No? Well then, perhaps I don’t love you!”

He could not see himself, could not see how his face steeled over and the blue eyes blazed, even though it was only a joke. Now she knew him well enough to recognize that the stony face covered fear. Quickly she put her hands up around his neck and pulled his face down to hers. “Of course I love you, Janos. I love you because you need me.”

Little by little he told her things about the past. Not the bad things; he did not wish to remember those. He told her about the picture of the stag. And he told her about the first day he had gone to the village, his mother belonging to him again, and the flowers he had picked that matched her eyes. He could talk of these things when he was close to her, lying near in the darkness, learning how to be with someone, to trust, to open a little of yourself and reach out, hoping she would not strike and hurt the open place.

In the autumn, soon after Leo had gone to the West, she came to his apartment one evening and, after a long silence, asked him if they could be married very soon.

“Why now?” he taunted. “When I wanted to marry you last year you made me wait.”

“You know I had to!” Her eyes filled with quick indignant tears. “There was Mama and me, no one else! I had to look after her. You would not have wanted to look after her if we had married.”

“No. I wouldn’t. So why is it all right now?”

Brown eyes fixed upon his face, she whispered, “Because Papa is coming to live in the town. He has given up the farm; he cannot fight any more. They have beaten him—the taxes and inspectors and threats of legal action—they have won. I love him, Janos. But I cannot stay in the same apartment with him, not when I love you too.”

Her pain was his. He never jeered at her when he knew she was genuinely distressed. He had known too much hurt himself to do that, and now, although he could not sympathize with her father’s loss of land, he could understand her sorrow.

“My poor little Terez,” he murmured. “What trials I have brought into your life.”

“Not you, Janos. Papa would have lost his land anyway, whether you and I were married or not.”

“He should have left a year ago,” he murmured. “He should have lived here with his family, sent George to school, and found work for himself.”

“You understand, Janos? I cannot see him every day, hurt and not understanding why he has lost everything, and then let him see me come to you.”

“I understand.”

“Can we be married soon?”

He waited, thinking. “Yes. But first I shall come to see him.”

“Oh, no! Don’t do that. Please don’t do that.” She giggled, a sound in which mirth was mixed with hysteria. “The days of asking my papa if you can marry me are over! They ended long ago, after the war—and when we took Nicky to Matrafured.”

His blue eyes fixed unseeingly on her. “I have to see him, Terez. I have to make him understand that you and I are nothing to do with politics, with him losing the land, with your Uncle Leo running away to the West. All these things have nothing to do with our marriage. I cannot take you from him without even speaking to him. Don’t you see how cruel it would be, as though I were seeking to humiliate him and revenge myself?”

“I don’t want you to see him.”

“I must.” His voice was crisp, curt. “When does he return?”

“Tomorrow.’”

“Good. Tomorrow I shall see him.”

He hadn’t been to the apartment since reporting Leo’s defection to the West. He was led by Terez into the shabby drawing-room with the bed in the corner for George. They were all there, dressed as neatly as they could be, sitting stiffly on their chairs, and for one moment he felt he was still the humble peasant child in the presence of the great Kaldys. Eva, strangely quiet, the roots of her dyed hair showing through a little; Malie, also quiet, hoping there would be no distressing scenes; Nicky and George, who smiled at him and then left the room; Adam, his old master... his excellency.

He saw at once that the old man was broken. There was no need to protest anything, no need to explain. Adam Kaldy had lost his land—his pitiful tenure of the old estate—and with the land had gone his strength. He felt a swift pang of pity, unreasonable but there nonetheless. Adam Kaldy was too old a man to learn the new ways, too old to take his loss with stoicism. He should have learned the lesson years ago that no man could depend on anything material for his life’s impetus. He had nothing now, nothing that counted.

“Mr. Kaldy,” he said sternly. “You know that Terez and I are going to be married.”

“You have taken my land. Why not take my daughter as well.” It was said not bitterly but tiredly.

“We have... a great affection for each other.” It choked him to say that in front of these three. The two ladies were staring at the floor, but he felt as though he were undressing in front of them. “Whatever events have occurred, however different our connections, our affection is genuine. That is why we shall be married.”