“I am sure.”
“Very well. Let us try and find the man, but discreetly and quietly. Remember this is a wedding, Leo. Your father and your Uncle Alfred will be very angry indeed if you make scenes or unpleasantness.”
“Yes, Adam.” He was more subdued now. The grown-ups, with all their authority and common sense, had taken over and he was suddenly a little frightened of the results of his declaration. His heart was thumping and he couldn’t understand Jozsef’s exhilaration in the search for the drunken peasant.
“We’re going peasant hunting, peasant hunting,” chanted Jozsef, and Leo felt sick.
“Shut up,” he hissed.
Jozsef looked hurt. “I’m only trying to help,” came the pained reply, and Leo, once more a victim of confused emotions, turned away.
They didn’t have far to go, just through the yard of slumbering forms and round by the stables. They found him where his comrades had dropped him, pillowed on a pile of straw with the scrawny child crouched protectively by his head. “That’s him!”
He said it, but all the time he was conscious of blazing eyes, of vitriolic hatred, of fear.
“Marton,” said Adam slowly. “That’s Marton, one of my peasants. His father... his father was with me on the Russian front, right at the beginning of the war.”
“That’s him.” His confidence was faltering now. What was Adam going to do? What would happen to the man? What would happen to the boy?
“I see. Yes.” Adam didn’t move. He stood looking down at the man, at Marton. No one seemed to notice the small boy, no one but Leo. Their eyes met and held. Leo looked away first.
Adam sighed, a tired, weary sound. Then he put his hand on Leo’s shoulder and pushed him away from the others. “Leo, you realize that you are the only one who says this man killed Uncle Sandor?”
“It’s him. I know it’s him.”
“But no one else does. It is your word against his.”
“But he is a peasant!”
Adam crouched down so that he could talk quietly to Leo. His face was only a little distance away and he looked old again, the way he had looked when he first came back from the war.
“Leo, if you are right we must call the pandur. And they will beat the man, Marton, in order to make him tell the truth. Do you understand, Leo?”
Leo swallowed.
“I want you to understand what you are doing.”
“What will happen? If they beat him and he tells the truth, what will happen to him?”
“They will hang him.”
Leo looked over to the pile of straw. The child was still staring at him. “Does he have any other children?”
“Yes. That boy is his eldest, Janos. He is not very old, Leo, no more than five or six. He must have been born soon after his grandfather died.” Adam had drifted away a little and was talking to himself. “He was a good man, the old Marton, nearly fifty but he came with me to Russia. A brave man.”
“His feet are bleeding.”
“Hmmm?”
“The little boy. His feet are bleeding.”
“Do you want me to call the pandur, Leo?”
Uncle Sandor, tell me what to do. He shot you, I’m sure he did. But if they beat him, if they hang him, the little boy will cry.
“Leo?”
The little boy—Janos—was still crouching, spitting hate, on the pile of straw, but finally the strain of scrutiny, the tension of something happening but not knowing what, broke him. He put his head down between his legs and began to cry. Marton turned his head and was sick again. Some of it went on the boy’s foot.
“No.”
“What do you mean, Leo?”
“Don’t get the pandur.” Forgive me, Uncle Sandor. I promised I’d find him and punish him. Perhaps I will later on, when he’s bigger and I can fight him. Then I’ll punish his father.
“I don’t want them to beat him. It is him—he shot Uncle Sandor—but I don’t want... the little boy, you see. I can’t—”
Adam stared at him, his face solid, impassive, no expression at all.
“It’s all right, Leo. I understand.”
“The boy—”
“Yes, Leo. I understand. I think you have chosen the right thing to do. Uncle Sandor—would he want you to hurt the little boy?”
“No.” But all the same he felt he had betrayed the old coachman. What should he have done? What should he have done?
“Come, Leo, we’ll go back into the house now. The wedding is over and the guests will soon be leaving. We must forget all about this. Don’t mention it to anyone, eh?”
“No, Adam.”
They walked away and the others followed. Once he looked back and saw that the peasant boy had stopped crying and was watching them furtively, like a nasty little animal.
They filed back through the yard, into the garden, and up to the terrace. He was too old to cry and so he clenched his fists and pressed them into his side. The attempt to control his misery was only just successful.
18
To think upon something, to consider and brood over a possible course of action, is frequently the first step towards acceptance.
The thought of marrying Mr. Klein—anathema to Malie—came to be a daily game of imagination. Where would they live? What were his friends like? Did he have any family? How could she marry someone whom she still addressed as Mr. Klein? And so on. And in some way living with the speculation, considering (frequently with distaste but occasionally with levity) this particular aspect and that especial possibility, removed the shocked horror that Papa’s revelation had produced. Of course she had no intention of marrying Mr. Klein—David—but she had promised to think about it, and it was an interesting exercise to wonder what kind of marriage it would have been.
Mr. Klein—David—went back to Budapest in the autumn, and throughout the winter and spring she thought about the idea of marrying him. Nursing Eva through a stormy, uncertain engagement, watching Papa grow more and more worried and seeing the household economies increase, she let the thought drift through her mind. What would it be like to marry Mr. Klein? She didn’t like him, but then she didn’t dislike him either. And, even though she couldn’t bear to be married to him, there would be advantages, great advantages.
She realized how rarely now she went to the theatre or to a concert. She had so loved music and she remembered with pleasure their year at school in Vienna, the concerts and operas they had attended. She had never spoken to David Klein about music, but somehow she knew he would enjoy it as much as she did. To marry him would mean concerts, ballet, theatre: in Budapest, almost certainly in Vienna—that is if Vienna ever managed to recover from the war—and possibly even Paris or London. On other days she would reflect that perhaps it would be better not to travel about with him when they married; she could stay on her own and enjoy his absence.
Listening to Eva protest that her engagement was all a mistake and that she didn’t want to marry Adam Kaldy, Malie would, between making sympathetic noises, acknowledge the fact that marrying David Klein would also mean escaping from Eva’s constant emotional crises.
Watching Papa grow fretful and old she would consider how good it would be to make sure that Papa’s securities were safe, to guarantee that every summer the boys could go up to the farm.
Once, in a mood of dull cynicism, she even found herself reflecting that Mr. Klein would obviously die long before she did. However unpleasant marriage to him might be, it wouldn’t last forever.
And permeating everything was one final question: If she didn’t marry Mr. Klein or someone else (and who else was there?), what would she do for the rest of her life? What was there for girls like her and Eva to do? Out of all their friends, all the girls they had grown up with, one and one only had accepted a working post. Juli Glatz taught French in the local girl’s school, which was considered an acceptable if rather second-best occupation for a young woman. It was acceptable only because Juli was extremely plain, not very rich, and twenty-fiv
e years old. The town generally acknowledged that with the shortage of young men it was unlikely that Juli would find a husband. Poor girl, at least she showed some kind of courage in accepting her inevitable single state and settling for a “vocation” instead.
Amalia, when she wasn’t thinking about marrying Mr. Klein, thought a lot about Juli Glatz. She thought about the freedom Juli must have: her own money, the chance to mix with people in the school whom she would never have met socially. She wondered why Mama and Papa (and Aunt Gizi and Uncle Alfred too) had spent a great deal of money educating their daughters when at the end of it all they were not expected to use any of it. One day, when Eva was sobbing theatrically that the engagement to Adam Kaldy must be broken, Amalia tried to talk to her about it.
“Very well, Eva,” she said brutally (it was the second time that week Eva had made her dramatic announcement), “break the engagement. And then, as you can’t marry Felix, which is what you really want, go out to work instead—like Juli Glatz.”
“What?” Eva’s tears vanished and two patches of red appeared on her cheeks.
“You—we—don’t have to get married. Why should we? Lots of girls go out to work now. Look at Papa’s office. Even Papa has lady typists.”
Eva was appalled. “But they are shopkeepers’ daughters, clerks’ daughters! Don’t be ridiculous, Malie! How could we go and work as typists?”
“We couldn’t,” said Amalia bitterly. “We don’t know how to type. We can speak German and French beautifully. We have studied Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Goethe. We know a little Latin, a little English, and we can play Beethoven sonatas quite well. But we cannot type or, indeed, do anything that would enable us to go out and find employment.”
“But why should we? We were the most popular girls in the town! We still are. Remember how they called us the enchanting Ferenc girls, that summer before the war? Do you remember?”
“I remember,” Malie said softly. “Oh, yes, I remember.”
“Well, we don’t need to find employment! Oh, I know they keep saying there are too many women and not enough men, but we don’t need to worry about that. Not us!”
Malie stared at her sister, her pretty, capricious, stupid sister.
“Eva, don’t you ever think about the future? You don’t want to marry Adam—you say you don’t love him—so what will you do? Will you break your engagement and live with Mama and Papa for the rest of your life, just waiting, hoping that someone else will come along? Don’t you see, Eva? Why should we have to get married? Why is there no choice for us when even a shopkeeper’s daughter has a choice? Why can’t we go out into the world and see what exciting things might happen if we didn’t get married?”
“That’s silly,” said Eva, bored. “You know very well we shall get married. I shall marry Adam and”—her face brightened—“I shall infuriate Madame Kaldy, who hates the thought of having me in her family. She has spent her whole life keeping Felix away from me. And now I shall be related to them. She will be forced to ask me to join every single family occasion. I will be Felix’s sister-in-law and she will hate it.”
“Oh, Eva!” She gave up, knowing it would be useless to try and make Eva understand. And indeed there was no need for Eva to understand. Eva was intended for matrimony. It would make little difference to her life style. She would continue to go to parties, buy pretty clothes, meet her friends for coffee, flirt, dance, tease. Look at Mama. Mama was forty-five and still enjoying these frivolous pursuits.
Mr. Klein came for short visits, brought little gifts for the three of them, was charming, entertaining, and left as elegantly as he had come. But the visits were not quite the way they had been. There always seemed to come a moment when she and Mr. Klein were alone together, just talking, and Mr. Klein would drop his bantering, amused manner and ask her all kinds of things, forcing her to think, to voice opinions and contradict him. He wanted to know her views on Horthy, on the emerging political system, on the economic crisis, on the anti-Semitism that was taking shape. He asked very few questions about her, about her emotions or feelings, but wanted to know everything about her ideas of the world. Once, roused by a slighting remark that emphasized her ignorance of topical matters, she flared into an attack on the system that didn’t allow women to know too much about current affairs or allow them to work without the stigma of “matrimony—failed” being attached to them. Mr. Klein had listened attentively to her and then asked, “So, my dear Amalia. And if you wanted to work, if you were a man and could choose any profession, what would it be?”
And, disconcerted because she expected a defence of the matrimonial system, she had floundered around seeking to choose a living for herself and had failed to find one. She had no vocation. The years of doing nothing had enervated her and now she didn’t know what she could do.
She wasn’t aware of when her acceptance of marrying Mr. Klein occurred. They never spoke of it when they were alone together, but sometime during the year that passed between Kati’s wedding and Eva’s, the thought of marrying him became no longer an imaginary exercise but an inevitability. Without either of them speaking of it, it came to be recognized between them. No details were mentioned, no dates or feelings were dwelt upon, but they both knew that at some point Amalia Ferenc would become the wife of David Klein.
As she watched Eva preparing for her wedding, sweeping herself into a frenzy of excitement where she could forget her misery over Felix, Amalia found a peace within herself. Karoly’s death no longer hurt, but the sweetness, the poignancy, the utter faith and sincerity of that first love still remained with her. Marrying Mr. Klein meant that she could keep that love inviolate. There would be no intrusion of passion into the memories of Karoly. Marriage to Mr. Klein—a sedate, calm, business-like arrangement where Mr. Klein got a young bride who was related to the nobility and she got a financial backer—meant that Karoly would be untouched. Eva, alas, was to know no such peace. Adam was young and in love with her. Felix was young and definitely not in love with her. Caught between the two, the one who did not want her and the one who did, she was in a state of nervous unbalance by the time her wedding day arrived.
The ceremony was smaller and more chic than the great pastoral Racs-Rassay feast of the year before. It was held in the house in town, the Bogozy silver and glass being once more removed from the vaults of the bank. The bridegroom was happier than the one at the previous wedding, and the bride far lovelier than poor Kati had been. Felix was just as excitable and charming, Kati just as nervous and unhappy (in some curious way they didn’t seem to be like a married couple; there was a lack of the bonding that even the most ill-matched couples acquire after a year of marriage). Madame Kaldy was angry but aristocratically controlled, showing her disdain for the match by wearing the same clothes that she had bought for Felix’s marriage: Adam, who in spite of orders to the contrary had insisted on marrying the little Bogozy trollop, did not deserve new clothes for his wedding.
And it was at the marriage of Eva and Adam that Mr. Klein acknowledged at last the unspoken arrangement between Malie and himself.
He was seated a little apart from everyone—legs elegantly crossed, one hand stretched casually across the back of his chair—and his dark, heavy-lidded eyes slid in amused contemplation from couple to couple, from coldly furious Madame Kaldy to Mama, who was excited, unbelievably happy, and a charming and delightful hostess. Malie found her eyes drawn repeatedly to him, and finally, because the secret smile annoyed her, she went across to him.
“How very strange, the mating habits of the young,” he murmured. “There is your poor little Racs-Rassay cousin—inconsequential, is she not?—married to the most attractive man in the room and obviously unimpressed. And now your sister—quite enchanting!—adored by that rather stolid young fellow and equally unimpressed.”
“Eva is very fond of Adam!” said Malie, nettled.
Mr. Klein turned his bland gaze upon her. “Come now, Amalia. You and I know very well that she cares little or nothi
ng for her unfortunate bridegroom. But I think fate is with her. Unwittingly she has chosen the right husband. He is solid, a little dull perhaps, but he will be to her what your father has been to your mother.”
“Papa has not always been good to Mama,” she blurted out.
“No, perhaps not, but you see, your papa has many conflicts to overcome within himself. He has protected and guided your mama. She has never had to face reality—unlike the estimable Madame Kaldy over there—and in fact I believe she would not be able to face reality. Your papa has given her the things she needs most from life: loyalty, stability, financial security, and discipline. And perhaps, because it has not been easy for him to give her these things, a little surface emotion has been lost on the way.”
She was fascinated. Mr. Klein had never spoken to her like this before, not about people and their feelings towards one another. In a different way from Papa he too often seemed cold and dispassionate, but now here he was, discussing love and human relationships with her.
“Do you ever think about your origins, Amalia?” he asked suddenly.
“My origins?”
“The room is full of Bogozys, your mother’s charming and delightful family. Do you ever think about your father’s family?”
“There’s Aunt Gizi,” she said slowly. “And once, when I was very small, Papa took me to see an old man, my grandfather. Papa said the old man never forgave him for marrying Mama.”
“No,” Mr. Klein replied quietly. “He wouldn’t forgive that.”
“You reminded me of him a little—the old man, I mean.”
“I too, like your papa, have thrown away my origins. In Hungary it is necessary if a man is to make a special kind of impact. But I think, Amalia, I am not prepared to shout my betrayal from the rooftops. To slide gently away from one’s roots is possible without too much inner conflict, but to say aloud, ‘This is finished; now I am a new man with new manners and customs’—this I cannot do.”
“I’m not quite sure—”
“I am saying, Amalia, that I do not think I can bring myself to marry you before a priest. For our children—yes—I can watch them at the altar even as your papa watches Eva, but my blood is not yet sufficiently diluted to accept the cross as the authority for our marriage.”
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