That was all he knew.
‘Whom did you see?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘Didn’t you recognize anyone?’
‘Nobody!’
‘How were they dressed?’
‘I don’t know!’
No matter how hard they tried or how much they threatened the lad they could get nothing else out of him. Of course it was true that he was still shaking with fright and it was always possible that even if he knew more he would never dare admit it.
‘What time did all this happen?’
‘I don’t know. It was night.’
‘All right. Early at night, or late at night?’
‘I don’t know. It was night. La noptye!’
Later at the inquest nothing more was discovered. Many people were summoned and questioned, for many people had been heard to utter threats against the hated money-lender. Every man who owed money to Rusz was a suspect and naturally this included all the men of Pejkoja. But no one knew anything, no one confessed or admitted even hearing anything. That night everyone had been at home, everyone had been asleep. The story was always the same. They were morose and sullen, shrugging their shoulders. They knew nothing; they had all been at home in their beds, asleep. No one even tried telling lies or making up complicated alibis by which they might have been trapped into discovery. ‘It was snowing. I was at home, asleep.’
Nothing was ever discovered.
It wasn’t until a month later that Abady heard the news in a letter from Honey Zutor. Honey had been summoned for questioning. They wanted to know where he had hung the meat that was to poison the wolves. He told them in exact detail. It is true that no poisoned meat was found near Pejkoja, but then it wasn’t found anywhere. It could have fallen into the snow and been long covered or it could have been dragged away and eaten somewhere else. One or two dead wolves were found; the corpses of others were no doubt deep under the snow. The only person who had been with Honey and who also knew where the meat had been placed was the forest guard Todor Paven. He was also questioned but he had returned with Honey afterwards and had spent the rest of the night with him in Scrind. Neither of them had moved from there until the next day when Rusz was already dead. Honey vouched for Todor and Todor vouched for Honey, who wrote all this to his master knowing that he would be interested in everything that affected the people in the mountains.
Balint read Honey’s letter on the terrace of the hotel in Portofino. Here, sitting before the calm radiance of the blue sea below, surrounded by fruit-covered groves of orange and lemon trees, it was hard to believe in the bitter winter up in the mountains, the all-enveloping snow, silent men striding forth in a blizzard, in cruel murder and mysterious comings and goings in the all-embracing darkness. Where Balint sat everything spoke of life and joy and the resurgence of spring. He could not have chosen a place better fitted for his work. He was surrounded by everything that was beautiful. The olive trees were covered in silver-grey foliage, the gnarled trunks glowed in the sunlight, the golden fruit of the orange and lemon trees hung everywhere among shining green leaves, the fronds of great palms moved gently in the breeze, and in the bay below small sailing boats flitted to and fro under triangular lateen sails. In the distance the rocky cliffs on the other side of the bay could just be seen through a haze of heat. Here Balint need only think of what was serene and beautiful and here he could shrug off all the worries of life and work quietly in a world that was free of troubles.
Balint worked calmly with nothing to disturb him. Even at home there was a lull in the otherwise turbulent political life in Budapest. Kristoffy, the Minister of the Interior, had managed to break down the organized civil disobedience of the municipalities, and those noisy undisciplined meetings that had so disturbed town halls all over the country had become rarer and finally ceased altogether. The counties and districts were now ruled by government-appointed commissioners and somehow the daily work of administration was done, though no one was quite sure how. As Parliament had not met to pass the budget no taxes had been put to the vote and so little money was coming in. Men who had completed their period of military service could not be demobilized and so the next age-group was not being called up. The recall of Parliament had been indefinitely postponed. In this situation the opposition sat quietly waiting with clenched fists, praying for the day when a total collapse of law and order would call them to power. It was their only hope. Even they had now come to realize that their economic and political programme was hopelessly inadequate and would never work, no matter how much they brandished their well-worn slogans. The party leaders went on repeating themselves, and they were echoed by the newspapers they controlled; but the general public, after all the excitements of the previous summer, was content to resume normal life.
Apart from what he was able to glean from the Hungarian newspapers, which took an unconscionable time to reach him, Balint had little news from home. One day he met an old friend in Genoa who told him that Gyeroffy was still gambling heavily and also that he had again been named as elotancos for the autumn season. He heard a little society gossip, how the King of Bulgaria had passed through Budapest and how a grand ball had been given by the archduke in his honour. This, apparently, had been a magnificent occasion; but it was of no interest to Abady.
Apart from his work Balint wrote only to Adrienne, short, non-committal letters every two or three weeks; and she in turn sent him news of what she was doing. He knew therefore that Addy had made her usual move to Kolozsvar for the winter and that there she was chaperoning her two sisters; that Wickwitz was not there as he had been unable to get leave of absence from his regiment. Judith was apparently much calmer, and Adrienne even wrote that maybe her sister had got over all that nonsense. Later Adrienne reported that the doctors had ordered an urgent cure for her mother, who had gone into a nursing home in Vienna. As a result the Miloth girls had also moved to the Uzdy villa where they were living in the rooms of Adrienne’s daughter who had gone to Meran with her grandmother. Adrienne now spent all her days with her sisters, for the old countess had closed the main reception rooms of the villa leaving Adrienne the use only of her own drawing-room in the wing that led off the courtyard. It was tiresome for Adrienne no longer to be sure of the privacy of her own rooms, but at least it meant that they passed most of each day in each other’s company. In consequence things were going much better between her and Judith. ‘It was rather awkward at first‚’ wrote Adrienne, ‘especially for Judith, but maybe she’ll stop thinking of me as her enemy! In the evening when we don’t go out to a ball they both come in and talk to me while I go to bed. We talk for ages … and that’s very good. I hope that I may be able to help heal her wounds. Maybe I’ll succeed …’
Their love was never mentioned in these letters; indeed they made only oblique allusion to it: Adrienne would end each letter with three letters instead of a signature: Y.E.M. And Abady would head his missives with the same cryptic initials. They stood for ‘Yellow-Eyed Monster’.
Each time that Balint reached this ending to Adrienne’s letters, he would think back to that day when they had walked up to the Hazsongard and he had angrily given her that name on realizing for the first time that for all her beauty she was not a real woman but only the incomplete image of one, infinitely desirable, but remote and hating the realities of love. How little progress he had made in his pursuit! Practically none, if their last day in the woods was any criterion. However perhaps it was better like that for who knew what might happen if he did become her lover? This was not something that could be a passing adventure, rather it would be a bondage for life. Perhaps, after all, it would be better to lose himself in work. He would pour his love into his writing and perhaps, possibly, if he could transform his feelings into words he would somehow manage to cauterize and burn out the yearning he felt to possess her body. As the weeks went by he consoled himself with these thoughts and became quieter, even, he fancied, free.
On 16th February a telegram arrived:
‘PLEASE COME AT ONCE. Y.E.M.’ No more. What could have happened? It must have been serious. Perhaps Pali Uzdy, or the mother-in-law? Whatever it was, however dangerous or disastrous, Adrienne clearly thought that only he could help. He had to leave at once to go to her; he must.
The telegram had been delivered early in the morning before his mother was awake, so Balint had plenty of time to work out some untruth that his mother would accept. Only one thing seemed plausible. Parliament had unexpectedly been recalled for 19th February, in three days’ time, and though there was no need for him to go, his mother would certainly believe him if he told her that he had been asked to return. It would only be for a few days, or a week, and then he would come back to bring her home.
Countess Roza listened in silence when Balint said that he had to leave at once for Budapest. Though her eyes filled with tears she said nothing to hold him back. At last she said: ‘All right, I’ll wait for your return. I know a few people here now so I shall not be too lonely. They’ll keep me company until you come back.’
Balint left the same evening.
Chapter Five
WICKWITZ HAD TO RETURN to his regiment in the middle of October. He did not want to do so but it was forced upon him by a chain of unfortunate events. In August he received a letter from Tihamer Abonyi, Dinora’s husband, begging him to come back to Maros-Szilvas for a few weeks so as to get his horses ready for the races at Vasarhely and Szuk. Abonyi wrote that he had no faith in any other trainer. When Baron Egon told Mme Bogdan Lazar that he was going to accept this invitation she was not at all pleased, thinking that it was merely his excuse for going back to Dinora. Nitwit tried to convince her that she was being stupid as he really was going there only to train racehorses, but she wouldn’t believe him and threw him out.
That autumn the Miloths did not go either to Vasarhely or to Kolozsvar and this made it extremely difficult for Wickwitz to keep in touch with Judith. Occasionally he sent her a scribbled note – addressed naturally to Zoltan – just to make sure that the girl ‘stayed in form’; but as letter-writing bored him and he felt he was no good at it he soon realized that he’d better look for some girl near at hand in Brasso, or his affairs would never get settled. He had heard tell of the daughter of a textile millionaire, who was going to come out that winter, so he did everything he could to scrape acquaintance. It might well have worked, for the girl clearly liked him, but her family began to notice Wickwitz’s attentions and, as they had already decided that the girl should marry a cousin who had shares in the family firm, they took care to keep Baron Egon away from the house. This was serious, because Wickwitz had spent a lot of time in pursuing the girl, time that was now seen to have been wasted, and the date was not far off when Dinora’s promissory notes, which he had deposited with the banker at Nagy-Varad, would expire. The Privatbank Blau, as the money-lender so pretentiously styled himself, had recently been pressing for repayment and though, this had been done with a veneer of respect, Wickwitz was quite bright enough to detect the menace behind the polite phrases. Something had to be done very soon, for Wickwitz was haunted by two little words that seemed engraved in huge black letters in his brain: ‘Infam kasssiert’ – dishonourably discharged – cashiered’.
At the end of January Wickwitz was at his wits end and wrote a letter to Judith, who was now in Kolozsvar, which completely revived the girl’s now somewhat faded feelings for him. Adrienne had been right when she wrote to Balint that Judith seemed calmer and more at ease. This had come about because it was now some time since she had last seen the Austrian baron and, as her infatuation was largely based on the sacrifices that she would make to save that unhappy man, it needed the constant reminder of his presence to keep her love alive. Judith’s feeling for Egon Wickwitz was based on the belief that she alone could save that great but unfortunate man, who was the soul of honesty but in trouble through no fault of his own other than his helplessness when faced by the world’s duplicity. She it was who could keep him from eternal damnation, and so she loved him. Now, however, it seemed that for several months Wickwitz had no longer been threatened, and so the self-sacrificing element in Judith’s love had had nothing on which to feed. Without a battle to fight on his behalf her love had lost its heroic character. She remained true to him, but she was prepared to wait calmly for whatever the future might bring. This was how she felt; and so, deprived of the urgency and opposition that had made her so rebellious and determined, she had gradually learned once again how to laugh and joke and be merry.
In this new letter Wickwitz reverted to the trick that had been so successful when he first wooed her. Then the lie had been that he could have had Dodo Gyalakuthy if he had not fallen in love with Judith and felt it dishonourable to go on pursuing the heiress. Now he used the textile manufacturer’s daughter. He wrote that he had only begun that pursuit so as to free himself from his ‘obsession’ with Judith, an obsession that was not fair to her. But it was no good, there was no way he could rid himself of his deep love for her and therefore it was better that he should, must, kill himself and be done with it. He could not live without her and he could not bear to share his life with anyone else. In a few days his shame would be public knowledge, so that it was better that he should shoot himself now – it was the only solution. There was, of course, one other possibility, but he hardly dared mention it and wasn’t even sure he wanted it: it was that Judith should elope with him at once. However, he would never ask for such a sacrifice. He would rather choose death! For once it was a well-written letter, and it was written well because Wickwitz penned the words with very little hope and with real despair in his heart.
When Zoltan gave his sister Wickwitz’s letter she answered it at once, getting her brother to address the envelope and post it. She wrote: ‘I do want to save you. Come for me. From here it will be easy for us to run away together.’
Three days later Wickwitz’ reply arrived, full of humble gratitude … and a carefully worked out plan. ‘We will go to Graz,’ he wrote, ‘and there we’ll be married in church. No civil wedding is necessary in Austria!’ His mother would find them a priest. In a few days he would get leave and come for her.
Margit Miloth, who was sharing a room with her sister on the nursery floor of the Uzdy villa, noticed a change in Judith when she received Wickwitz’s first letter. She said nothing and she asked no questions but merely watched and saw Judith’s attempts to conceal her agitation and her sudden increase of nervousness. She also saw Zoltan hand over the second letter and again watched her sister carefully and noted where Judith hid it when she went to bed. Later, when Judith was asleep she got up, took the letter quietly from its hiding place and hurried down the servants’ staircase and along the passage to Adrienne’s apartments. In her long white nightgown she flitted down the dark corridor like a benevolent ghost.
Adrienne was in bed, reading. Margit sat down beside her and together they read Baron Egon’s letter. The next day Adrienne sent the telegram to Balint to call him back from Portofino.
Abady arrived in Budapest the evening before Parliament was due to reassemble. He decided not to go on to Kolozsvar until the next afternoon so that he would be able to attend the morning session. He knew from the newspapers that he had bought on his journey that this time there would be no adjournment but that Parliament would almost at once be dissolved by royal decree. This was contrary to all law and custom for it was part of the constitution that Parliament could not be dissolved until the budget had first been passed. Balint saw the whole manoeuvre as a violent step which would widen the rift between the Crown and Parliament and could lead to open rebellion. Anxiously, he went straight to the Casino so as to hear the latest news. The great hall and all the public rooms were filled with a large crowd all talking excitedly, even though this new move had come as no surprise to the people in the capital for, just as it had been at the beginning of the crisis, everyone already thought they knew what the government was planning and what the coalition party’s answer would be.<
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As it had been a few months before, so it was now, and everyone in the Casino had their own ideas of what was going to happen on the following day. They wandered from group to group noisily broadcasting their views. The only thing upon which everyone agreed was that a period of dictatorial rule had started and would continue into the foreseeable future. What should be done? There were worried faces on all sides. Everyone had a different theory. No doubt, swore some of those arguing in the Casino, their leaders would come up with some clever, hitherto unthought-of solution, politically adroit and unassailable. As they waited for definite news the arguments raged. One idea, which made everyone laugh gleefully, was put forward by a well-known Budapest lawyer renowned for his wit; and this had at once been been headlined in the newspapers. It was beautiful, it was simple and it put everyone in a roar. Briefly it was that all Members of Parliament should at once resign their seats and all elected official resign their positions. Thus there would be no speaker, no officials of the house, not even a sergeant-at-arms to whom the royal decree would be handed.
They Were Counted (The Writing on the Wall: the Transylvanian Trilogy) Page 70