The Phoenix Land

by Miklos Banffy

  Twenty Five Years (1945) was published posthumously by Puski, Budapest in 1993 and later reprinted together with From My Memories in one volume. This contained a short foreword by Bánffy himself, a translation of which is included in this volume. I am indebted to the editors of both editions of Twenty Five Years (1945), as their notes have been most useful to me in the writing of notes for this English edition.

  In both these books Bánffy, who never failed to see the humorous side of any situation, however serious it might have been, uses a light and ironic tone, as if Puck’s aside ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’ was never far from his mind (although in the kindest, most gentle way). It is clear that he reserved expression of his deepest feelings of love for his country, his reverence for honesty both in public and private life, his passion for the forests, rivers, meadows and wildlife of the mountains and valleys of his native land, his compassion for the unfortunate and exploited, his tolerance of folly or weakness, his disdain, almost amounting to hatred, of fraud and exploitation of the weak and powerless and, above all, his deep understanding and love of women, for his novels, especially the great trilogy The Writing on the Wall.

  From my Memories was published in 1932, after Bánffy’s retirement from active public life, partly through ill health and partly through disgust and disillusion at the treacheries and dishonesties of those who sought power for their own selfish reasons rather than for the good of others. Following the death of his father, Bánffy had retired to his home in Transylvania, the great and beautiful castle of Bonczhida only a few miles north of Koloszvár (now renamed Cluj-Napoca by the Romanians), and was devoting his time to writing. He, together with some others of like mind, founded a publishing house and spent much of his time in the encouragement of those Hungarian writers and painters who had remained in their home province after sovereignty had been transferred to Romania.

  It is not clear when Bánffy started work on the great trilogy that told the tale of those crucial years from 1904 to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. It seems to have been conceived many years before the author himself had returned to Transylvania and some years before he had produced the first volume of memoirs. Into it he poured all his feelings about Hungary and its people both humble and grand. Here he painted the picture of a great nation in decline, brought low by the folly and shortsightedness of its ruling class, to which he belonged and saw so clearly, unlike other writers who looked from afar but saw it only through the mists of envy or prejudice. As a chilling account of the folly of politicians and the blinkered vision of the rich and privileged, it draws much of its power not only from the fact that Bánffy knew this world from the inside but also because he wrote with a restraint that made his implied criticisms all the more powerful.

  In 1981, when the Communists were still in control despite the cracks that were even then beginning to appear in many parts of Eastern Europe, Professor István Nemeskurty wrote a long article in a respected Budapest literary review in which he pointed out that if the state truly wanted the youth of Hungary to understand why their country had suffered so much between the wars, they should be made to read what had been written by a member of that former ruling class who had held power in those days and who had, in many ways, been responsible for Hungary’s downfall. The writings of such men would provide a far more reliable idea of what had really happened than most of the works by officially approved proletarian writers of working-class background. In particular, he said they should read Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian trilogy which, published in the 1930s, not only painted an unrivalled portrait of the social life and politics of those crucial years between 1904 and 1914 but was also a spellbinding tale by a master novelist who was worthy of comparison with Tolstoy and Lampedusa – high praise, indeed, especially from so respected a Hungarian critic.

  Nemeskurty’s reasoned enthusiasm led to the reissue in Budapest in 1982 of the first volume, Megsámláltattál – They Were Counted, and this in turn was followed in 1993 by a de luxe edition of all three books in one mammoth volume under the original general title of Erdélyi Történet – A Transylvanian Tale and more recently as The Writing on the Wall in an English translation of all three books as They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting, and They Were Divided, published by Arcadia Books, London, in 1999, 2000 and 2001. A French translation of the first book came out in June 2002 and the second will appear in 2004.

  Bánffy’s great trilogy, even though the first two volumes came out in 1934 and 1937 and immediately went into several editions, was never previously translated into any other language, since the third book was not published until 1940 when the world was already wracked by war. Miklós Bánffy’s daughter Katalin had long wanted to produce an English version of her father’s most famous work, and this ambition was eventually to be realized with the collaboration of the author of this introduction.

  One last diplomatic mission came in the darkest days of the war. I make no excuse for quoting here what I wrote in the Introduction to the English translation of the first books of the Transylvanian trilogy, They Were Counted for although Miklós Bánffy’s Twenty-Five Years (1945) had only been written some two years after the events now described, that last posthumous work does not relate anything that took place after his return to Transylvania. I wrote then:

  ‘On 9 June 1943, Bánffy went to Bucharest to meet the Romanian foreign minister, Georges Mironescu, in order to try to persuade the Romanians to sign a separate peace with the Allies and thereby forestall a Russian invasion and the destruction that a Soviet-imposed political revolution would inevitably bring about. Despite warnings from Hitler that he knew very well what was going on, both sides did agree to abandon the Axis, but there the agreement stopped. Romania, whose claim to historic rights over the whole region had brought about the transfer of sovereignty after the First World War, wanted the immediate return of Northern Transylvania, while Bánffy argued that it would be better to leave this question in abeyance until the war was over when the Great Powers would make a final decision.

  ‘Bánffy’s private dream, and that of many other Transylvanians at that time, was that this would be the opportunity for Transylvania once again to become semiautonomous as it had been in the seventeenth century. The return to Hungarian rule of the northern part of the province by the 1940 Vienna award had not been greeted by many important Transylvanians with quite the same joy that it had been in Budapest. What Bánffy and his friends really wanted was a measure of independence for their beloved country; and although he and the Hungarian Foreign Ministry both wanted to postpone a decision on the future of Transylvania, it was not entirely for the same reasons. Neither wanted to offer such a hostage to Fortune as would be a preliminary pledge to return those disputed lands to Romania. It was an agonizing choice, for Bánffy realized that unless both Hungary and Romania agreed to abandon the Axis, this dream would be forever unobtainable. Nevertheless, the negotiations were continued, and there was a further meeting between him and a Romanian delegation, this time headed by Iuliu Maniu. Once again the stumbling block proved to be the Transylvanian question, and negotiations were broken off on 23 June 1943.’

  Everything that Bánffy had feared was now to come to pass. Romania and Hungary were invaded by the Russians, and Budapest was ravaged by the devastating siege of Budapest and the destruction caused by the last grim struggle between the German and Russian armies. Back in Transylvania the castle of Bonczhida was looted of its contents and set on fire by the retreating German army.

  Now, ironically, some fifty years after Bánffy’s death, and just as the importance of his name and work are once more becoming recognized, phoenix-like the castle of Bonzchida is being restored as a cultural centre by the Transylvanian Trust which, with English artisans and the patronage of the Prince of Wales, is now helping to restore some of the neglected national treasures of the ancient province of Transylvania.

  From My Memories

  Part One

  A Wartime Coronation

/>   Chapter One

  It was nine o’clock on a cold November evening.

  A few minutes before everything had been the same as on any other night in wartime. Very few people were to be seen in the streets, the theatregoers were in their places and those dining out snuggly indoors. The newsboys’ shouts were stilled. One or two belated pedestrians hurried along the empty pavements, and there could occasionally be heard the clatter of horses’ hooves from a passing hackney carriage. Apart from this … nothing. But at nine o’clock on this day a sudden excitement spread all over the city. People streamed out of the theatres, cinemas and restaurants, hurrying into the streets in silence, some of them still buttoning up their coats as they went, others muttering to each other in low voices. Everyone was going home and, as they went, they stopped in little groups, huddled in front of the newspaper stands where one single announcement was headlined in huge letters of black. On most evenings the people of Budapest, sick of the monotonous sadness of war news, would hurry past the depressing newsstands – but tonight they stopped to look and read. On this evening their minds were no longer preoccupied by the gentle panacea of crossword puzzles, nor by their fears of growing poverty: today, for a while, they put aside their daily anxiety for those on the front line, their fears and worry for husbands, sons and brothers who were prisoners-of-war, their anguish for the dead. Today all were overcome by the sense of a great national disaster, by the fear of what was to come and the terror of an unknown future.

  What was drawing everyone to those brightly lit newsstands was the announcement of the death of Franz Joseph. Everyone knew that it must be true, and yet it seemed almost impossible to believe that the man whom few men living could recall ascending the throne, who had in himself enshrined the whole concept of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and of the Hungarian kingdom, and who, for most of those who trudged the streets that night, had been a disembodied symbol rather than a real man of flesh and blood was now no more. The bald facts had to be faced: from this day there would be a new ruler – a young man that as yet few people knew anything about and that the old familiar sovereign who, although infinitely aged and infinitely mysterious, had been to all his peoples the unchangeable and ultimate arbiter of their lives, had finally said his last farewell.

  From the police headquarters in the city messages were telephoned to order that all performances should cease in the theatres, cinemas and concert-halls, and that all restaurants should close. As it happened, these messages arrived after the news itself. The music had been stopped, the curtains rung down, and the people themselves were already on their way home. It had not needed a police order for the Budapest public to know how it should show respect for such news as this.

  It had been the same for me. At noon that same day the news was spread abroad that the old king had taken a turn for the worse. That night I did not, as I otherwise always did, go to the opera but remained instead at the Kaszino Club, which was always in close touch with the office of the Minister-President. There I was sure to be contacted at once if there were any official instructions for whose dissemination I would be responsible. Immediately I had heard the news of the king’s death I had telephoned to officials at the Opera1 and the National Theatre, and both informed me that the news had already reached them, been announced from the stage and that by now most of the audience had left.

  The next day was cloudy. Everything seemed darker than usual.

  After the official obituaries and leading articles written to bid adieu to the old monarch came the details of his last hours: simple, dispassionate, crystal-clear – and as cold and as transparent as crystal too – just as he had lived his whole life. He had worked at his desk, as he always did, until he had finished everything he had to do. This was a discipline he had always imposed upon himself, a duty he had performed daily. At the end of each day there was no unfinished business to be later put in order, and at the end of his life it was the same, even in his last hours. Before he went to bed he took the document case in which all those confidential papers that had been sent to him that day were kept. His last words were as simple and unpretentious as his life: ‘I am tired.’

  Only that – a phrase he might have uttered any evening during the last half-century when he, the man who worked hardest of any in the kingdom, retired to bed.

  The funeral was held on the last day of the month.

  I had hardly returned to Budapest after the funeral – and certainly had not yet rid myself of the disagreeable impressions made by the chaotic arrangements inside St Stephen’s Cathedral – where the noise and tumult and confusion were all the more unexpected because of the fastidious manner in which all state occasions were usually handled at the court of Vienna – when I was summoned to the meetings held to start preparations for the coronation in Hungary. I had to present myself at the old royal palace in Buda that very morning, 1 December.

  We gathered in the anteroom of the Minister-President’s office. Present were several ministers, the chairman of the Council for National Monuments, the chief of police, several heads of various departments of the civil service … and the press.

  Everyone was in a subdued mood, for all had heard the news of a terrible train disaster that had occurred during the night on the Brusk line. The express from Vienna, packed with people returning from Franz Joseph’s funeral, had run head-on into a passenger train going in the opposite direction. The morning papers only contained a few lines about the disaster, but there was enough to tell the world that there had been hundreds who were badly hurt and at least thirty dead, among whom, it was almost certain, must be counted Lajos Thallóczy, the eminent historian, creator of Bosnia and a trusted confidant of the dead emperor. Many of those at our meeting had had relatives returning from Vienna that night, but no one knew whether it had been on that train that they had been travelling. Each time that some newcomer arrived at the meeting he would be quickly surrounded and asked what new details had become known. Although the atmosphere was calm and controlled, there was an underlying feeling of anxiety and fear … and each new arrival brought more horrifying and surprising details. It was a black day.

  Around the table everyone sat with set expressions on their face, trying not to show that they all felt that this terrible accident occurring on the night of the old king’s funeral, in the third year of war and almost on the eve of the new king’s coronation, was a sinister omen. Everyone had the same thought, but no one put it into words lest it should be tempting fate.

  However the time was passing and, whatever might have been in our hearts, there was work to be done and decisions to be made. Therefore, setting aside their gloom and personal anxieties, the members of the Council got down to their task. Firstly a committee of administration was formed and then the Council allocated certain specific responsibilities to various individuals. As for the past four years I had been directing the state-sponsored theatres, I was given the artistic direction of the ceremonies and responsibility for the street decorations as well as for the interior of the coronation church itself.

  It was a fearful task, for all sorts of reasons. At first it was planned to hold the coronation before Christmas: then it was postponed until 28 December … and then postponed again until the thirtieth. This was the last date possible for it seemed that for the country’s finance laws to be legally valid they must receive the royal assent, and, for the royal assent to be legally valid, the king must be crowned and in full possession of his prerogatives. We therefore had just twenty-six days in which to get ready, twenty-six days in the depths of winter, with snow, ice and frost and barely eight hours of daylight; and all this in wartime when the only available materials were those which happened by some chance to remain stored in the warehouses, and the labour was restricted to those artists too old or infirm to be defending their country upon some distant battlefield.

  I was lucky with the artists and could not have wished for more willing or more competent assistants. Only at one point did I encounter any difficulty. />
  It was a tradition that at the coronation the country should offer the new ruler the symbolic gift of thousands of pieces of gold, the coins being placed for these purposes in an ornate coffer specially commissioned for each occasion (the gold itself appeared only briefly at the time of its official handing-over to the sovereign; it was returned to the state bank immediately after the ceremony). The case was ordered to be made by Bachruch the jeweller, and Professor Zutt, an art teacher, offered to provide the designs. His first sketches were dreadful, completely shapeless and undistinguished and no more Hungarian in style than if they had been done by some savage islander from Fiji. Of course Professor Zutt was from Switzerland and so probably thought that his ideas faithfully reproduced the old Hungarian local colour. Three or four times he was asked to produce new designs … and each time they were uglier than the last. After two weeks’ struggle the jeweller announced that on that very day he would not undertake the work. I had no idea what to do. From sheer necessity I sat down and made a design myself, placing special emphasis on two silver angels to be modelled in relief and which I had no doubts would be superbly carried out, on time, by my friend the sculptor Ede Telcs.

  Zutt lost his temper and returned in a pique to Switzerland.

  Our workshop was established in Disz Square, in one of those large storage buildings pointed out by the big toe of Zala’s statue of the angel. There, in front of the military memorial was our headquarters: workshop, offices, design shops, everything. It was unheated and very cold but magnificently lit from great high windows.

  Inside life soon became quite unreal.