The Countess (4 page)

My uncle István, who would be king of Poland, was then prince of Transylvania and had great plans for reuniting Hungary against both the Turks and the Habsburgs, plans of which my father and many other nobles besides approved. My father’s lands were in the far east of Upper Hungary, near the Partium with Transylvania, so he was always careful to pay attention to which way the winds were blowing. My father sent men and money to my uncle, a skilled negotiator who vied with both the Turks and the Habsburgs to see who would win his loyalty. My uncle made friends in Poland as well, marrying the Polish princess Anna Jagiellonka, since my uncle believed that country was Hungary’s strongest ally and best hope against the machinations of the sultan in Constantinople and the Holy Roman Emperor in Bécs. His plans for a Hungary united with Poland against both the Turks and Austria excited many of the nobles of the old kingdom, dreaming of former glory. But after the old sultan died, the Ottomans would gradually grow less and less interested in the doings west of the Tisza, leaving Lower Hungary to a succession of pashas who never stayed long enough to make themselves at home in the palace at Buda. The nobles vied with each other, and with Bécs
and Constantinople, for what was left of the old kingdom, so that no one managed to put up a serious threat to either.

Yet when I remember the Hungary of my childhood—a country torn apart by peasant revolts, by the disaster at Mohács, by the sultan’s occupation—I remember not a world of dust and sorrow but the lights and music of my father’s house in the marsh at Ecsed, where he and my mother entertained their friends and relatives from all over the remnants of the old kingdom. I remember the sounds of the cimbalom and the tambor, the swish of ladies’ skirts as they moved in the dance, the softness of their voluminous white sleeves. I remember the servants lighting the lamps here and there in the house, illuminating the corridors, their faces glowing as if lit from within. It seemed a world full of hope still. It is a child’s memory, surely colored by a brush of emotion, and yet in many ways it is more true to my experience than all the history I was to learn about later, about the sadness that came with being a Hungarian after Hungary, as we had always thought of it, had ceased to exist. When I think of your grandparents, Pál, it is always one endless celebration, days of light and music.

A few months after the birth of my youngest sister, my father hosted a tremendous gala in thanks for my mother’s safe deliverance from the dangers of childbirth, and it was then that I saw how noble he really was, how good and kind a protector of his people. At that time there was a band of gypsies who camped in the village to sing and play at the festival, to dance and tell fortunes. I saw them coming down the castle bridge, speaking in the strange tongue that no outsider understands, bringing their instruments inside the great stone house with its whitewashed walls and green-tiled roof. Ecsed was crowded with family and friends. Aunts, uncles, and cousins came from Bécs, from Prága, from Pozsony and Gyulafehérvár to stay on the estate and spend nights drinking and dancing, bringing their servants and their children with them, their gifts of silk and strings of pearls and little prayers framed in gold. My cousin Griseldis
Bánffy—then just a child of seven but already so golden in her face and form that every woman in the room stopped to stroke her yellow curls—arrived with her parents in an enormous red carriage drawn by four matched white horses. Orsolya Kanizsay, the wife of the deceased palatine Tamás Nádasdy, came all the way across the country from her house at Sárvár, in the west, bringing as a gift a carpet of golden thread that had once belonged to the great king Mátyás Corvin himself. She had come to inspect me as a possible bride for her beloved only child, Ferenc Nádasdy, though I did not know it at the time.

All that week the house buzzed with preparations, with cleaning and cooking, with the baking of bread and the slaughtering of oxen and goats and capons to serve the guests. Great barrels of wine and enormous wheels of cheese were taken from the cellar, and stores of straw were brought in from the countryside to bed the many horses. For days there were voices in the corridors and the sounds of gypsy music coming from the banquet hall—the sting of a zither, the trill of a flute. The children of the other noble families, my cousins and friends, filled up the house with their shouts, their races and their games. As the eldest daughter of the house I was expected to entertain the other children, devise competitions and dances to keep them out of trouble. Little Griseldis especially I found difficult, for she was a spoiled and savage thing whose mother, having lost her other three children to the plague, indulged her every whim or desire. Every sweet Griseldis wanted, Griseldis got. Every order Griseldis gave, she expected the rest of us, no matter our superior age or position, to obey. I was patient with her for days and days, fetching her a bit of cake only minutes before the midday meal or letting her chase the puppies underfoot in the kitchen, but it was when she wrestled a doll away from Zsofía, who was a year younger and a whole head shorter, that I pinched the meat of her thigh until she cried and told her that if she didn’t learn to behave like a civilized child I would lock her in a closet for the remainder of her visit. She whimpered and pouted,
but after that she did what I asked without complaint, and I learned almost to enjoy her company.

She helped me the day I concocted a game of capture the flag to entertain the children’s court, building small castles with bundles of firewood for the little ones to defend. I convinced István to put aside his religious tracts and instead set him the task of playing the Ottoman forces surrounding the gates of Buda, his head wrapped in a bit of old cloth for a turban, and for once he seemed to enjoy himself. The younger children, even Griseldis, laughed at how easily he fell down when they rained their blunt-tipped little arrows at him, how dramatic were his death throes, his heels beating at the dusty ground. She threw herself at him like a little
hájduk
, a bloodthirsty grin curving across her red mouth. I had to drag her away to get her to stop gleefully kicking him in the shins.

My role was to play the pasha’s harem. I wrapped myself in pieces of bright gauzy silk, pouting like a wife, and demanded my “husband” pay more attention to me than to his wars, stomping my feet and threatening to kill myself for love until István would leave the castle siege and come give me a little kiss, placed tenderly on my mouth. “There,” my brother said, sounding just like a husband, “that should hold you for now.” Pleased with his attention, I went back to being the placated, dutiful wife for a few more minutes, but there was little for me to do except sit around and bat my eyelashes and pretend to fan myself. Eventually I gave Griseldis my piece of silk and let her do the pouting for me, which she managed only too well. Bored, I told István I was leaving him in charge while I checked on baby Klára and her wet nurse. István looked around at the little girls and boys of the children’s court as they argued over the toy swords and arrows, as they cried and wrestled over the bundles of firewood, and begged me not to leave him there alone with the little savages. “Don’t go, Erzsébet, for God’s sake,” he said. A panicked look crossed his face.

I laughed. “Don’t worry,” I said. “If they break anything, you can
simply tie them to a post and leave them there till morning.” I promised I would be right back after checking on the baby.

Once out of sight of the other children, though, I slipped down to the banqueting hall where the adults were drinking and dancing to the strains of the gypsy music and crawled under a table to keep out of sight. In the great hall the tables were set with delicate glass plates on which the servants brought meats red with paprika, great bunches of grapes like calf’s brains, hot dumplings dripping with butter. The ladies, the Báthory cousins from Bécs and Prága, wore skirts of dark velvet and starched white blouses, and leather slippers too fine and soft to wear out of doors in the spring mud. But it was their faces I watched, the jealousy that stole across their countenances when they saw my mother, recovered by then from her confinement, her face flushed pink and her eyes alight under long dark lashes, bowing and smiling at a dozen men who crowded around her to offer their congratulations or beg to fetch her a glass of wine. Her ladies had dressed her hair in nets of pearls, stiffening the ruff at her neck and fastening it around her throat like a great white platter upon which to serve her beauty. She had a heart-shaped face, the face of love, my father called it. A tiny woman, no bigger than a half-grown girl and with a girl’s lighthearted laugh and high, lilting voice, she was the envy of every noblewoman in the country, though she did not seek the company of the other women, preferring instead to spend her evening with the men. She conversed with her admirers in Latin or German on matters of history, philosophy, even warfare, earning her their respect and admiration even as she excited their desire. When she had entertained her guests enough, my father came and took her hand himself, and the two of them danced around the floor laughing and smiling into each other’s faces. I longed to be like her, to dance and sing and be the object of everyone’s attention, man and woman.

The nurse found me asleep under one of the tables, curled up on a bearskin, my stomach groaning. She took me up to bed, scolded me
roundly, and tucked me in, but long into the night I heard the gypsies playing and the throaty cry of their singing coming in through my window. My heart thudded to the music with such happiness that I could not sleep.

Long after midnight the party began to die down. One by one the ladies and gentlemen fell on piles of furs or else went up to the rooms my parents had prepared for them, falling against each other on the stairways and in the halls in their drunken state. The gypsies remained awake still, laughing and singing, drinking the strong apricot liquor called
pálinká
and eating the food left behind on the tables by the fat and sleeping guests.

No one remembered afterward what started the argument. In their drunkenness two of the gypsies began to fight, shoving and cursing, knocking over the benches and waking the house, rousing the servants and the guards alike. It ended when one man accused the other of selling off his daughter to the Turks. The invaders were feared all over the land when I was a child, particularly by girls. My mother had told me stories of Turks snatching girls from their beds in villages all over the country, selling them into slavery, into brothels, taking them back to Constantinople to hold for ransom. Nothing was more terrible for a girl than the thought of being captured by the Turks, and no Hungarian subject, not even a gypsy, would be permitted to collaborate with them without the direst consequences.

There were more shouts and accusations, and soon the gypsies were calling for the lord of the house, demanding that my father arrest the accused man then and there, have him taken in chains to the dungeon to await trial for his crime. The accused man’s friends held him fast until my father, who as the lord of Ecsed was governor of those lands, came down and sent for the guards. They bound his hands and feet and transported him into the storage rooms of the cellar, the bowels of the castle, to wait for the police.

It was near dawn, and the sky was lightening little by little in the east. When he was gone, my father and his guests went back up to
bed, and the rest of the gypsies were sent out of the house to sleep in the fields surrounding the marsh.

When the local magistrate was brought in to preside over the trial the next morning, the accused man claimed the Turks had stolen his daughter, that he would never have sold her off. The police said they found a large amount of gold in his pockets and that the accused man had not been able to tell them where he had come by it. At first he said it was payment he’d received for selling several goats, then that he’d found it in a hollow tree along the road from Pozsony. None of it was true, of course. Saying that the man’s crime could not go unpunished, and by way of making him an example to the local populace, my father asked the magistrate to sentence the gypsy to die outside the walls of the estate the next day. “For the sake of that poor girl,” said my father afterward, embracing my mother as he came into her room, “there must be justice.” The set of his jaw and the coldness in his expression made me shiver, for there was nothing in him in that moment of the father I knew and loved, only the great lord and landowner who was responsible for upholding the law in the village and all the surrounding lands. That my father could have more than one life—that he could be both my father and this stern authority figure, this great nobleman, at the same time—had never occurred to me before. He was father not just to me but to everyone who lived on his lands, including the wretched girl whose own flesh and blood had sold her off like a piece of livestock.

The gypsy was kept in the stables that night, locked in a stall and guarded by twelve men with guns. For long hours I could hear the condemned man standing at his window, crying and begging for mercy, his voice rising and building with wave upon wave of grief. Because I could not sleep, I stood at my windows and listened.
Save me, great lord, have pity on me
, he said in his strange accent, his voice breaking with emotion.

What would it be like, I wondered, to know you were going to die, and to know the death would not be a good one? I pictured the
condemned man waiting in his cell, watching the moonlight move across the floor, marking the minutes of his last night on this earth. I pictured him alone, weeping and afraid, as I heard him calling out his despair.
Save me
. More often, though, I thought of his daughter. What might she be suffering now, if she even lived still? Her own father had handed her over to the invaders, listened with indifference as she begged him not to abandon her.
Save me
. What kind of callousness would it take for a man to accept his payment and turn away to leave with his own child crying out for him? It rent my heart. I, who was so beloved of my mother and father, could not imagine a fate worse than being made a slave, a whore, my virginity stolen, my body beaten. I tried to imagine what punishment would be fit for a man who had treated his own flesh with so much disdain. Would he have his eyes plucked out, his
heregolyó
removed with hot pincers? Would he be roasted alive atop a throne of iron, the way the rebel György Dósza had been after the peasant revolt? Nothing seemed like justice enough. I trembled with rage under my blankets, and that morning while my nurse was still asleep I slipped out of my rooms once again and down to the gate.