They Were Counted (The Writing on the Wall: the Transylvanian Trilogy)

by Bánffy, Miklós

  After greeting their hostess, the latest arrivals were conducted to the smoking-room to meet their host, whose stalking story, still not completed, was destined never to reach its end, as no sooner had the newcomers greeted him than the dinner gong sounded announcing that it was time to go and dress.

  The house guests who had arrived that afternoon then gathered in the great entrance hall, whence they were conducted by servants to the rooms allocated to them and where their luggage had already been taken and unpacked and their evening clothes laid out.

  Peter Kollonich stepped over to Laszio. ‘I hope you don’t mind but we’ve had to put you in the kitchen wing! There are so many women and married couples this year that there seemed no other way. We thought you, as the nearest relation …’ and he waved to a footman to show Laszlo the way.

  The footman went to a door in the opposite side of the hall from the great State rooms where the guests had gathered. Here there was no carpet, only great stone slabs which formed the floor of the corridor. They passed the silver vaults and the butler’s pantry and along the whole length of the castle’s kitchens. Here was none of the majestic silence that had seemed to rule the other parts of the huge building. From inside the kitchen came the clatter of copper pans, the sound of the chef’s voice raised in anger at some underling and all the multifarious rhythms and drumbeats that made up the symphony of sound that accompanied the creation of a great formal dinner. A door flew open, and then slammed shut after a kitchen boy had shouted something back before running off down the passage in front of them. A scullery maid, her face flushed, ran in the opposite direction and disappeared through another door which she too banged behind her. A bevy of chambermaids, giggling, emerged from a narrow staircase and hurried past, across the courtyard, towards the guest wing.

  No one paused respectfully as a guest passed. It was as if they had not even seen him.

  After two turns in the long corridor they eventually reached a large room at the end of the wing opposite that where Laszlo had found his host. It was a good room, spacious and high ceilinged, differing only from the guest-rooms in the other part of the house in its old-fashioned decoration and cheap, worn furniture. Even so, it was incomparably better than Laszlo’s flat in Budapest.

  Once again Laszlo felt a surge of bitter resentment that he, and only he, had been exiled to the servants’ wing – to a room which he knew was usually used to lodge visiting valets or artisans called to work in the castle. Even Peter’s friendly words of reassurance – ‘our nearest relation’ – did not soothe him. After all, Stefi Szent-Gyorgyi was a first cousin too, and he was with the other guests. Why just me? Laszlo wondered as he sat down in front of the old-fashioned dressing-table.

  Old impressions flooded back to him as he sat gazing unseeingly at his ivory hairbrushes laid out in front of him. There was nothing new in the discrimination made between him and his cousins. When he had been a child he had hardly noticed, and when he did he put it down to his being an orphan, with neither father nor mother to protect him. At that time, too, he had romanticized the situation and imagined himself, perhaps after reading some children’s book like ‘The Little Lord’, as a hero of mystery, the young heir to a great position unrecognized in youth only to be triumphantly re-established after years of obscurity. This impression of a mysterious secret was accentuated by the fact that in his presence his father and mother were never mentioned.

  His grown-up relations were invariably kind and attentive. At Christmas, and on birthdays, he received the same presents as they gave to their own children; at first the same toys, later there were books, riding whips, 4.10 shotguns or .22 rifles. While at school in Vienna at the Theresianum, when one of his aunts came to take the Kollonich and Szent-Gyorgyi boys for a Sunday outing, or to the opera, or to eat cakes at Demmel’s, he was always one of the party and, during the holidays, either here at Simonvasar or with the Szent-Gyorgyis, there was nothing to remind him that he was after all, here, there and everywhere, in the last analysis, a guest.

  Only gradually, as he began to grow out of adolescence towards adulthood, did the real truth begin to dawn on him. Little things, minor pinpricks that wounded self-esteem and his pride – noticed perhaps only by one who had been made extra sensitive as a result of being an orphan – revealed the reality of the discrimination against him.

  Some of these incidents came back to Laszlo as he sat unhappily at the table in the room usuaily given to visiting guests’ servants. One year, when he was about fifteen, the Kollonich children had been bought ponies which were ridden by Laszlo whenever he was at Simonvasar. On one occasion when the Moravian riding master was teaching them how to take their fences (though these were only low bars and hedges) the horse that Laszlo was riding came in badly, fell and strained a shoulder. The next day Niki, then an ill-behaved little brat four years younger than Laszlo, said to him:

  ‘You lamed my horse! I shan’t let you ride him again!’ Maybe it had only been said to tease, or perhaps it had just been a piece of childish arrogance, since the ponies were ridden by all the children and only nominally attributed to any one child; for it was the riding master who decided who rode which mount. But to Laszlo, to whom no pony had been allocated, these remarks, uttered thoughtlessly, suddenly brought home to him that he did not really belong and that even his cousins still thought of him more as a dependent than as one of themselves.

  Another, more painful memory came to his mind. They were having a boxing lesson and it was an unwritten law that even when they boxed in play, heads shouid not be touched. Laszlo was sparring with his cousin Louis who, though a year and a half younger than he, was a large and strapping youth, headstrong and self-willed. From the start Louis had ignored the rule about blows to the head and Laszlo had begun to lose his temper. By chance he had hit Laszlo on the mouth, loosening one of his teeth and splitting a lip from which blood spurted copiously. The fuss had been appalling: not that Louis minded at all but the princess, told at once by one of the girls’ governesses, had been cold and angry and had made Louis apologize publicly to his cousin – even though the bruises on his own face were clear evidence that it was not he who had started their rough play.

  Even now he could recall the menace behind his aunt’s icy forgiveness. The meaning was clear enough: any repetition of such behaviour would entail automatic banishment. That had been eight or ten years before.

  With the passing years he became more and more aware of the gulf that divided him from his cousins, of the financial and social differences that set him apart. And though this awareness never provoked his envy, nevertheless it gnawed upon his consciousness and made him increasingly ill at ease in his cousins’ presence. It was, perhaps, the unjustness that had most upset him. Why should he be the one to be exposed to the cruelty of being treated with undisguised contempt by visitors who spent half a day at Simonvasar without noticing his presence, to the disdain of the servants who, with an arrogance they would never dare show to their masters, would, rinding themselves along with Laszlo, relax from their obligatory immobility, lounge about and even chat together, something they would never permit themselves if they could be seen by even the smallest Kollonich or Szent-Gyorgyi child?

  The second gong, announcing that dinner would be served in five minutes, broke into Laszlo’s reverie and sent him in haste to scramble into his evening clothes.

  Chapter Two

  LASZLO REACHED THE LIBRARY just as the guests were starting to move towards the dining-room.

  At the head of the formal procession the princess was escorted with old-fashioned courtesy by the field marshal, resplendent in dress uniform. Behind him in order of precedence followed other couples, the ladies’ hands resting lightly on the arms of the gentlemen who accompanied them. Laszlo joined in at the rear with his cousins for whom no more ladies remained to be escorted. Slowly they progressed through the long music-room to the formal dining hall beyond it. This was an exact duplicate of the marble salon on the other side of the house.
It was one and a half stories high and its walls were covered in stucco decorations painted in a butter yellow colour. As the room had been completed at the end of the 1830s, after the great days of the classical revival, the marbleized panels were edged with multi-coloured garlands of roses in high relief, the corners softened and curved. In the centre of the panels were escutcheons of flowers and great wreathes of roses which seemed full of movement and warmth, and gave an air of lightness and festivity to the huge high formal apartment.

  In the middle of the hall stood a vast wide table covered with a white starched linen table-cloth which was in turn almost concealed by the profusion of silver objects covering its surface. Down the centre of the table stood eight giant candelabra decorated with sculptured goats’ heads and standing on tripods imitating the legs of roe-deer. Between them were ranged several tall oval urn-shaped vases with lids representing swirling acanthus leaves and, placed between the larger objects, a multitude of other high and low covered dishes crowned with pine-cones and pineapples in massive silver. Though the intention had been to reproduce what was thought to be the Greek style, here there was none of the severity of the Empire period. All these objects were elaborately decorated with curves, domes, lattices, bunches of grapes, entwined branches of vine leaves and pearls, so highly polished, so rich and complicated, that the general impression would have been irretrievably restless had not the brilliance of the light from the electric chandelier above dissolved the detail of over-rich craftsmanship into a unity of glitter. It was the famous Sina service, a treasure in itself which had been made for the imperial banker by silversmiths from Vienna.

  The host and hostess took their places opposite each other at the centre of the table, and the other guests ranged on each side of them in diminishing order of precedence.

  The dinner started in the usual silence that marks a fashionable gathering. It was as if a devout atmosphere was obligatory, with the guests playing the part of the congregation and the frozen-faced hieratic butler and lesser servants that of the officiating clergy. These last moved round the table in ceremonial silence and intimidating efficiency. Not a plate clattered, not a glass tinkled: the solemn hush was broken only as the butler or head footman poured wines with a soft murmur of mysterious words ‘Château Margot ’82? … Liebfraumilch ’56?’

  Slowly, under the influence of fine wines and excellent food, most of which appeared in unrecognizable magic disguises, conversation began and a general hum of talk could be heard as the guests bent towards each other, nodding, smiling and beginning to relax and enjoy themselves.

  Magda Szent-Gyorgyi turned towards Laszlo. ‘Nice things we hear about you!’ she said roguishly, looking away from him as she spoke with a quick bird-like twist of the head.

  Laszlo had no idea what she meant.

  ‘Oh, don’t deny it!’ Her tiny rose-red mouth pouted and she went on in a whisper, ‘We all know why you’ve been hiding in Budapest all these months!’ Her little pointed tongue darted in a swift movement over her lips as if she were tasting something sweet and she glanced at her left-hand neighbour, Lubianszky. Seeing that he was busy talking to Countess Kanizsay she turned back to Laszlo and with more assurance said boldly: ‘Tell me, is she very beautiful?’ and then with wide-open eyes, ‘… your little cocotte?’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ asked Laszlo, sincerely puzzled.

  ‘Oh, you, you poodle-faker!’ Her low voice gurgled with pleasure as she used the slang word a young girl should not have known. ‘They had to ring three times before you opened the door and you didn’t turn on the light for fear they’d see something of hers, right?’

  Then it dawned on him. She was talking about the evening when Peter and Niki had come to his little flat in the evening. He turned angrily to Niki who sat next to him around the corner of the table.

  ‘Did you invent this nonsense?’

  But Niki only hung his head in mock shame and, grinning wickedly back, did not answer. He was sitting too far away for Laszlo to go on without attracting attention so, ignoring Niki, he turned back to Magda and was about to speak when the thought flooded through him that if Niki had told this pack of lies to Magda he had surely related them to Klara. Angry as never before that the sweet Klara, so pure and innocent, should have been exposed to the frivolous Niki’s thoughtless slanders, the blood rushed to his face.

  ‘You’re blushing! See how you’re blushing!’ Magda whispered triumphantly. ‘What a bad fibber you are!’

  Before Laszlo could reply a long serving dish floated between them. Like a silver ship carrying on its deck a pile of little grass-green and white striped hearts, a wonderful and famous dish, the fifth course that evening, was called Chaud-froid de bécasses panaché à la Norvégienne. When this battleship sailed away its place was at once taken by two destroyers in the shape of oval silver sauce-boats. The conversation which had been interrupted by the arrival of the woodcock, was finally killed when an arm stretched out towards Laszlo’s glass and an unctuous voice murmured in his ear, softly and mysteriously, ‘Merle blanc ’91?’

  Laszlo looked across the table to where, farther up, Klara sat between Fredi Wuelffenstein and the Principe. And so low were the décolletages that year that all he could glimpse of the girl over the mass of silver ornaments on the table were her head and bare shoulders.

  He had not seen her in evening dress for at least a year and it struck him how she had filled out in the intervening months and how much more beautiful she had become. When he had last seen Klara she had been somewhat skinny and undeveloped, almost anæmic, still with the body of an adolescent though she was nearly twenty-two. When he had thought about her, which was often, he had not thought so much about her body but always about her expressive grey eyes. And now, suddenly, she was all woman, radiant with femininity. Her face had a higher colour, her mouth was fuller and redder, her neck and shoulders and the curve of her breasts were all rounded out with the fullness of a baby’s flesh and the bloom of ripe apricots, and her pale smooth skin shone with an inner glow, not the glow of alabaster or marble but rather that of some ripe and living fruit. As the sea reflected the sun’s rays on the arms and bare flesh of a bather, so the light of the electric chandeliers reflected through the prism of the multifaceted silver touched the pale salmon-colour of Klara’s skin with a myriad tiny lights, glowing green and mother-of-pearl on her shoulders, dancing at the corners of her mouth as she spoke and under her chin, moving back and forth with every slight movement she made. A modern Venus Anadyomene, thought Laszlo, gliding above waves of frozen silver. And in his delight he forgot all his previous annoyance.

  Klara felt his eyes upon her and from across the table she looked up at him with a smile in her eyes.

  He wondered if she sensed how beautiful he thought she was.

  By the time the dinner was coming to an end everyone was talking at once and the conversation at the centre of the table was all about the latest political events in the capital. The prince, a member of the Austrian Herrenhaus in Vienna, had begun the subject.

  ‘Is it true that the two-year Military Service Bill has been passed? We don’t seem to have heard anything about it!’ His manner implied that he took it almost as a personal insult that the news had been made public in Budapest before it was known in the capital of the Empire.

  Old Kanizsay overheard the prince’s words. He could hardly believe his ears. ‘Nah, so was!’ He was shocked, for to someone who had started his career in the army when military service had been twelve years, this seemed hardly credible. ‘Two years to make a peasant into a soldier! Absurd! Have they announced it in the House? Has His Majesty agreed?’

  ‘Surely His Majesty knows best!’ said Szent-Gyorgyi in faint reproval.

  ‘It was forced on the Government by pressure of public opinion,’ explained Lubianszky, who never lost an opportunity of putting the blame on the Minister-President. ‘Tisza thought that it would help to get the Defence Bill passed. Of course he was wrong, and it�
�s all been for nothing!’ And he started to retell the story of the uproar in Parliament on November 18th, stressing how all the Standing Orders had been cynically ignored.

  Kanizsay seemed to like this. ‘Diese Tintenschlecker! Diese Bagage! – these penpushers! What rubbish!’ he said, referring to the Hungarian opposition, and when Lubianszky turned towards Abady for confirmation, the old field marshal looked in Balint’s direction and said:

  ‘Kennst Du diesen Tisza? Was ist der für ein Kerl? 1st er ein guter Kerl? – Do you know this Tisza? What sort of a fellow is he? Is he a good fellow?’ he asked in a loud nasal hectoring voice.

  Balint had to laugh. ‘Oh, yes! He is quite a good Kerl!’

  But Lubianszky was not content to leave it at that. He started to explain at some length what a mistake this show of strength had been, how there was nothing left now for the Government to do but to resign and thereby make legal the disputed amendment. Lubianszky did not have an easy time with his political dissertation as almost every sentence was interrupted when a servant offered him the dessert: a mountainous ice-cream – ‘Bombe frappeé à la Sumatra?’ – or dishes of whipped cream, biscuits and petit fours. Then, as he started again, a liveried arm extended in front of his face and a sepulchral voice murmured in his ear: ‘Moët & Chandon Réserve? Tokay ’22?”

  All the older men present – Kollonich, Szent-Gyorgyi, and even Wuelffenstein, though he was sitting some way away beside Klara, began to join in the discussion. Only Count Slawata said nothing, though he seemed to listen intently despite the fact that as the talk became more heated the others mostly spoke in Hungarian. With his eyes screwed-up behind the thick glasses in the manner of so many shortsighted people, he listened and observed.