by Ann Swinfen
Sofia looked stunned at all this organising.
‘You would not mind, to drive in Hungary? They drive on the right, you know.’
‘Yes.’ Kate laughed. ‘I do know. It will be all right. I’ve ordered a Peugeot like mine, so it will be quite familiar, apart from the left-hand drive. When we used to go to France years ago with the children I drove sometimes. It will be easy.’
Privately she felt a chill in her stomach at the thought of it, but she smiled bravely. It would be the first bit that would be the worst, driving out of Budapest. Large, unknown cities were always confusing, and she wasn’t sure whether the road signs in eastern Europe would be recognisable. Once they were out in the country she was sure she would be able to cope. She had already studied the route in the European road atlas, and the drive from Budapest to Györ looked simple enough.
‘Please, Sofia,’ she said again, scooping up another handful of gooseberries. ‘It would be wonderful. You want to go, but don’t want to go alone. I’ve lost my holiday, and would love to visit Hungary. I can’t speak Hungarian, and you can. It’s the obvious answer.’
‘I cannot allow you to pay,’ said Sofia stiffly, getting up and tipping the gooseberries into a colander. She ran the tap over them, shaking and stirring them with her fingers to rinse off bits of leaf and stalk.
‘The point about the money,’ said Kate, ‘is that if we don’t spend it on going to Hungary it will just be thrown away.’
‘Well...’
‘Good, that’s settled then,’ said Kate hastily. ‘Now, you do have a passport, don’t you? You said you’d been to France about three years ago.’ A sudden thought struck her. ‘You didn’t go on a visitor’s passport, did you? I’m sure Hungary requires a full passport.’
Sofia began to pack the gooseberries into Kilner jars.
‘I have a full passport,’ she said guardedly. ‘But once we are in Hungary, you must allow me to pay my share of everything.’
‘Of course,’ Kate agreed blithely, intending no such thing. She had no idea how Sofia derived her income, if indeed she had anything apart from the basic pension. Even a published poet, writing in Hungarian, was unlikely to earn anything visible to the naked eye from her writing. If they could just reach Hungary, any further battles about paying could be sorted out there.
‘When did you say the tickets are for?’
‘Monday. I thought perhaps I could bring Beccy and Chris round this evening to meet you. Chris would be happy to live in your cottage and look after the animals, if that would help. He even likes gardening – unlike most young men of his age! Would it be all right for us to come? About seven?’
Sofia poured the sugar from the scales into a pan and added water from a measuring jug. Crossing the kitchen and taking up a wooden spoon, Kate began to stir the syrup for her. She saw that Sofia was flushed, and not just with the heat of the stove.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said contritely. ‘I’ve rushed you. Stupid of me. You’d only just begun to talk about going back, not thought it through. And I come crashing in with my two left feet, bossing you about. It just seemed such a chance, as I had to use the travel money anyway.’
‘No, no.’ Sofia washed her hands under the sink tap, scrubbing in vain at the fruit stains on her fingers. ‘You were right. Left to myself, I would never have had the courage to make the decision. Together, we will do this. Bring the young people this evening.’
* * *
Following days of indecision, István had decided to ring his niece Anna, Magdolna’s daughter. The discovery of his parents’ papers had, he found, disturbed him profoundly. After the time of terror which had marked his early childhood, life in his grandparents’ house had been peaceful and secure. The Rudnays had been briefly in great danger after the armed Russian invasion in 1956, but as the regime became less totalitarian their lives became easier. When he grew older István learned to shut his mind to the past and concentrate on his studies. His determination to become a doctor, he realised years later, was the one tangible legacy of that fearful time.
He married at twenty-two and he and Maria lived very happily for four years, in one and a half rooms near the hospital in Budapest where he had his first job. Their joy in the birth of László was not at all clouded by the near impossibility of feeding two of them on István’s salary, without the addition of a third.
One bitter January when László was three months old, István had returned tired from a long day in the casualty department to find the tiny flat empty and the stove unlit.
‘Old Kati says there will be meat at the butcher’s shop today,’ Maria had said at breakfast. ‘I’m going to see if I can buy some chops.’
‘You’ll have to queue at least two hours.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll carry László in the sling and we’ll have a walk in the park afterwards. The fresh air will be good for him.’
But it was dark now, and they should have been home hours before. István checked with old Kati on the ground floor and the Hermanns on the floor above, but no one had seen Maria. With growing anxiety he lit the wood stove which she had left ready laid, and started to make potato soup for supper.
When the doorbell rang, part of his mind was already prepared.
A policeman, as young as himself, stood on the landing outside. He looked pale and sick, and for a moment István thought he had come looking for medical help. He was holding a dirty white bundle to which, inexplicably, fragments of leaf and dry grass were clinging.
‘Dr Rudnay?’ The young policeman swallowed with difficulty.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m very sorry. I’m afraid I have bad news for you.’
Maria had slipped on the icy pavement and fallen in front of a heavy lorry which could not stop. István was required to come and identify the body.
He had felt no pain then. Only numb disbelief.
‘But she was fine this morning,’ he said stupidly. ‘She just went to the butcher’s shop and for a walk in the park.’ Somehow it seemed important to establish these facts. Maria would be back at any moment.
The policeman reached in his pocket and brought out a squashed package wrapped in brown paper and blood-stained.
‘She had this in her basket,’ he said. ‘Nothing else. It’s two lamb chops.’
István took the package, looked at it, then thrust it back at the policeman, shaking his head.
They stood staring at each other, locked into the impossibility of speech. Then the dirty bundle in the curve of the policeman’s arm stirred and a thin wail rose from it. István recoiled with shock as the other man held the bundle out to him.
‘He was thrown clear. A passer-by found him lying safely under some bushes beside the pavement. He seems to be fine. We had him at the station while we sorted the paperwork and traced you. He’s probably hungry.’
Reluctantly, István took the bundle. From within the shawl two eyes looked up at him watchfully. A small fist worked its way out and pounded the air between them.
‘László,’ he said.
After the funeral, István decided he could not go back to his job in the casualty department. Any day he might be confronted with another young woman like Maria, who could not be saved.
‘I became a doctor because I wanted to heal people,’ he said to Magdolna, when he arrived in Szentmargit with the baby, needing the help that only she could give. ‘Our facilities at the hospital are so poor, there is almost nothing we can do for the serious cases. That isn’t my kind of medicine. I want to be a family doctor. I want to know the whole family. I want to bring babies into the world, and help mothers to rear healthy children, and give labourers some ease for their bad backs. And with the old people, I want to sit and hold their hands as they slip away quietly in their own beds. Does that sound foolish and sentimental?’
Magdolna, who had recently finished her studies under Margit Kovacs and returned to live with their grandparents, knew that her brother was neither foolish nor sentimental.
/> ‘I think it’s a very good plan. If you are a family doctor you can practise from your house, so you are always there for László. We will find you a good nurse-housekeeper. I wish you could come back here to Szentmargit, but old Dr Krautz retired last month, and the new doctor isn’t much older than you. You will have to find somewhere else – but, please, not too far away.’
In the end he had set up his practice in Sopron, which was much further from Szentmargit than he had intended, but he had not, on the whole, regretted it. Although he would have liked to be nearer his family, Sopron was a good place to work. Not large and impersonal like Budapest, or even Györ, but still a town of fairly respectable size, which allowed him to introduce preventive medicine clinics long before they became fashionable. The local people soon recognised the skill and kindness that lay behind his quiet manner. He also found himself treating the visitors sent to Sopron to convalesce. Famous for its healthy climate, it lay amongst woods on the edge of the mountains rising to the Austrian border.
When these visiting patients turned out to be – as they often did – high Party officials on privileged rest cures, István treated them impersonally and held his tongue, though the recollection of his own origins underlined the irony of the situation. There were others, though: sickly children, factory workers trying to rebuild their lives after accidents, frail old people hoping to regain a little strength. As the country began to recover and readjust its politics, there were more of the latter kind of patient, and fewer of the former. Nowadays there were no Party bosses. István wondered sometimes what had become of them all. Had they fled to Russia? If so, they must be having a very thin time. Some, of course, had re-emerged in politics, wearing different colours and swearing their conversion to democracy.
István’s own life was undergoing subtle changes. His education finished, László was gone, working in the south in a village near Mohács, not far from the border with the former Yugoslavia. It might even be possible for István to move back now to Szentmargit. Magdolna said that the village doctor was thinking of retiring early, as his own health was not good. But István was proud of what he had created in Sopron. He thought he would probably stay here.
What he had not bargained for was this sudden re-emergence of his past. First his frightened boyhood and then the brief, happy years with Maria had been closed away in the locked rooms of his mind, and he did not want to revisit them. He knew that if he began to probe too deeply into his parents’ lives, the old pain and terror would be reawoken. Already his sleep was troubled, and he found himself, from time to time, not attending properly to his work. Yet, despite this, the old longing to know his father seized him. His mother he could remember quite clearly. He was twelve when she died, and she was only thirty-two. It astonished him to think of it now. He had already outlived her by nearly eighteen years. He could summon up her face, almost catch the sound of her voice in his ears. But his father had been taken away too early.
He was going through the papers very slowly. Partly this was because he was busy with the practice just now, in the last few days before he left to spend his summer holiday with Magdolna and her family. Partly it was because he was half-fearful of what he might find, or of what effect his discoveries might have on him. One of the most tantalising items so far had been the letter from the man called Ferenc Kalla, who had rescued his father from the freezing Danube after he had been shot and dumped by the Arrow Cross in those last terrible days of 1944. At that time the Russians were moving in on Budapest, pounding it mercilessly with heavy artillery, and the departing Germans and the local Fascists were looting and killing indiscriminately.
He himself had been a few months old then and living in the partisan camp in the woods between Sopron and Szentmargit. He knew that he had been born in the camp, in a rough hut of brushwood, and as there was no doctor or nurse, or even another woman partisan apart from his mother, he had been delivered by one of the men who had been a shepherd before the war and reckoned that a human baby was not that different from a lamb.
His father had been away from the camp at the time, but István had heard his grandmother tell the story. When his father returned from blowing up a railway line used by the Germans for bringing war supplies into Hungary and found himself the father of a lusty, squalling son, he had insisted on setting off at once to have the child christened.
‘So if he brings the Boche down on us with his yelling, at least his soul will be saved when they bayonet him.’
Many of the partisans were communists and thought the idea of getting the baby christened was crazy, but his father, though not a churchgoer, was in his way a deeply religious man. István’s parents had walked the twenty kilometres to Szentmargit to hold the christening by night in the village church, in a ceremony performed by the selfsame priest to whom the letter from Ferenc Kalla had later been addressed. When he was told this story as a boy, István had been quite caught up by the romance of himself as a newborn baby appearing from the forest and then disappearing again. It made him think of King Arthur, one of his boyhood heroes. Later, when he realised that his mother had given birth, then risen from her brushwood bed two days later to walk twenty kilometres to the church and twenty kilometres back, he realised who was the real heroine of the story.
All these thoughts were going through his mind now as he telephoned Anna at her student hostel.
‘All I would like you to do,’ he said, ‘is to try to discover who lives at that address now. See if you can find out anything about this Ferenc Kalla or his family. He describes it in his letter as his parents’ flat, so he was probably quite young – younger than your grandfather.’
‘It’s fascinating, Uncle István.’ Anna’s clear, cool voice came down the phone from Budapest. She was uninvolved. For her this was like a story out of a history book. Her distant tone jarred slightly with István.
‘Yes, well, if Ferenc Kalla hadn’t saved your grandfather’s life, Magdolna would never have been born and you wouldn’t exist, young lady.’
‘No,’ said Anna thoughtfully. ‘I suppose I wouldn’t. I’ll certainly do what I can.’
‘If he was, let’s say, twenty at the time, he’d only be seventy now.’
‘Mmm. Well, of course it is fifty years. He may not have survived at all.’
She made it sound like a millennium. István felt suddenly tired and old.
‘If you do find out anything, just let me know, will you? I don’t want your mother upset until we have something definite to go on.’
‘Absolute discretion promised. It’ll be rather good practice in a way. For when I’m a lawyer and have to direct investigations.’ She sounded half joking, half serious. ‘When are you going home?’
Like Magdolna, she regarded Szentmargit as his real home.
‘I’ll be with your parents from the second of August. They’ll miss you this summer. So will I.’
‘I’ll try to manage at least one weekend while you’re there. Bye for now. Got to go. Someone else is waiting to use the phone.’
‘Goodbye, Anna. And thank you.’
* * *
As they walked along high water mark, their feet crunching in the dried bladder-wrack, Kate wondered how much she ought to say to Chris. He and Beccy were a little behind her, following absent-mindedly while they talked of their own affairs. All she had told them so far was that she was going on holiday abroad with Sofia, who needed someone to look after her animals while she was away.
Beccy had been unsurprised by the collapse of her parents’ planned holiday. She had shrugged and said, ‘Well, what did you expect? Crossbow Computers has to come first always in our lives, doesn’t it?’
There was a harsh note in her daughter’s voice and Kate suddenly realised that she was not alone in her bitterness at what the greedy corporate demands were doing to Tom and to the family. She had tried – contrary to her own earlier reactions – to make excuses for him, but Beccy was having none of it.
‘You go off and have a holid
ay with your friend and let him stew,’ she advised. ‘Maybe if you aren’t here all the time providing support and comfort he’ll realise how much you matter. At the moment he treats you as though you’re of no account at all.’
Kate was stung. Yet this was how she had been feeling herself – resentful, ignored and lonely. She made up her mind to enjoy the holiday with Sofia and to sort matters out with Tom when she returned, when she would be in a calmer frame of mind and the crisis with his project would have resolved itself, either well or badly.
The day had been a little overcast and twilight was setting in early. Ahead of them she could make out a faint glow marking the position of the cottage. She had not previously visited it in the evening, and it seemed more isolated than ever after the long walk up the darkening beach. The lower windows were screened by the wall, and as they drew nearer she realised that the light from one of these windows was catching the leaves of the Bramley apple tree from below. In the chancy in-between light the leaves glowed silver, like an olive tree caught by some Mediterranean breeze. Kate decided that she would simply introduce Chris to Sofia, and make no further comment. She had no idea whether Sofia wrote under her own name, or even whether she was indeed the poet he was seeking. Apart from her teasing smiles she had never admitted to Kate that she was.
As usual, the bell at the gate triggered a volley of barking from Ákos, but Sofia came at once and drew back the bolts. Ákos threw himself upon Kate with delight, but growled a little in his throat at the other two, despite Sofia’s remonstrances. Chris knelt at the gateway, not attempting to go forward until the dog had inspected him thoroughly and allowed himself finally to be caressed.