“We could not be married by a rabbi!” she cried, suddenly alarmed. “I am not—I do not... no! It would be terrible!” Mr. Klein raised a sardonic eyebrow. “Really, Amalia, how very foolish you can be sometimes. Do you think I would even contemplate such a thing? No, we shall be married in a civil ceremony. And I would suggest that we go to Budapest. I shall hire a suite in a hotel and we shall give a very smart and graceful party. I am told that to be married in a hotel is considered the very latest fashion!”
She liked the idea. He was being a little patronizing, a little arrogant, but unwittingly he had selected the right way to do things. There would be no thoughts of Karoly, no “might have been” in a smart civil ceremony in a Budapest hotel. It would be the symbol of their entire... arrangement: in good taste, undemanding, civilized, pleasant.
“That seems to me admirable,” she said calmly, and he smiled, the warm, affectionate smile that she had seen only rarely on his face. He reached for her hand and held it for a few seconds.
“Amalia,” he whispered, “do not forget your origins entirely. Remember the old man sometimes.”
There was confusion in her breast, a stirring of unease, and then as the warmth of his hand communicated itself to her, the sense of affinity overcame her again and she felt at peace—secure, safe, and at peace.
“I think we shall be very... comfortable,” she said, and Mr. Klein nodded.
It was some time later that she realized they had both accepted the fact that no proposal had been necessary. All they had done was to confirm the engagement.
And it was also some time before she realized her physical aversion to Mr. Klein had vanished some months ago.
Mama was dreadfully upset. Her face blanched when she was told and it was several moments before she could speak. She managed to smile and murmur, “How surprising. David and my little girl, my last little girl. All my children leaving me,” and then she had put her hand to her mouth and left the room. The three of them, Malie, Mr. Klein, and Papa, had been left in uncomfortable silence.
“She is overwrought,” said Papa finally. “The wedding tired her; she grows too excited with these affairs. And she relies on Amalia. I think she hoped that Amalia would stay with her for some time yet.”
“Of course.” Mr. Klein was frowning.
“And she has to face the fact that you will take Amalia away from the town. You will live in Budapest for much of the time and Marta will not be able to see her too often.”
“We shall come here many times,” said Mr. Klein, still frowning. “I have invested greatly in the town, as you know, Zsigmond. We shall live in Budapest, yes, but there will be many, many business visits here. And in the summer we shall be together up in the mountains.”
“I think I will go and speak to her,” Malie said, rising from her chair. “I’m sure it was just that she had no idea.... Eva has always confided in Mama, whereas I—she had no idea at all, you see. I will go and speak to her.”
“Yes, Amalia. That would be wise.” Soberly they watched her leave the room. She was aware of their silence long after she had left them.
When she reached Mama’s room she listened and heard the distressing sound of Mama crying. She knocked, and when there was no answer she went in. Mama was lying across the bed with a handkerchief clamped to her eyes.
“Oh, Mama! You mustn’t be upset! I’m not going away forever!”
“He’s far too old for you!” Mama sobbed. “And he’s... he’s not suitable for you! You’re not suitable for him! He has no right to marry a girl!”
“Mama, I’m not a girl any longer. I’m twenty-five. I’m nearly an old maid!”
“You’re too young for him!” Mama cried. “He needs an older woman, a mature woman who knows the world and could entertain him, amuse him, someone who would appreciate his presents and his manners and his—oh, everything!”
“I appreciate him, Mama,” she said slowly.
“No! No, you don’t. You’re too young to appreciate a man like that. Why, you even threw his roses away. Eva told me. And you can’t talk the way—other women can talk. You’re too serious!” She sat up and flung one arm out into the air, trying to say with a gesture what she could not say with words. “Oh! You’re just too young for him, Malie!”
She couldn’t answer. She just stared at Mama, her face growing white. Mama burst into tears again and flung her arms round Malie.
“Darling! I love you and I want you to be happy. I didn’t mean to hurt you. You are lovely. Karoly—he thought you were lovely and you are, my dearest, you are! But—oh, no, not David. You cannot marry David, Amalia!”
She didn’t reply. There was nothing she could say. She sat feeling pity for Mama but, as well as pity, an emotion verging on dislike.
“How could he!” Mama sobbed. “Humiliating me this way, marrying my daughter. We are practically the same age, Malie! Do you realize that?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“He will be my son-in-law!”
She sat by the bed and watched Mama sob and rage and finally quieten. She went and fetched smelling salts and coffee, and she closed the blinds and left Mama to sleep her distress away. Later Mama tried to put it right. She explained that she wanted Malie to be happy and have a young, energetic husband. She didn’t want Malie to marry an older man just because she didn’t think a young one would come along. But of course, if Malie had set her heart on it, then Mama would give her blessing, her fond and loving blessing. She got up and bathed her face and dressed with great care. And by the time she came down to dinner she was nearly back to normal. She laughed and flirted with David and said how very naughty he was, stealing her daughter from under her nose. She said a great many gay and foolish things, like telling him he must call her Mama and pay great respect to her. Mr. Klein didn’t laugh. He was very serious, and he stared at Mama with a small frown on his forehead.
By the time dinner was over everything was natural again and they began to talk about the wedding, and whether Mr. Klein and Malie should have a new apartment in Budapest or use Mr. Klein’s present one. Mama was charming and gracious, and everyone relaxed, everyone except Malie.
That night, overwhelmed with a sense of complete isolation, with the knowledge that she was, in spite of all her rationalization, marrying a man who was a stranger, she cried for Karoly for the very last time.
Part 2
19
The boy, Janos, accepted without question the manner of his living, which was, with a few gradations, a few varying niceties of very poor, poor, and not quite so poor, the manner of living of those all about him.
His home was a room in a single-storied hut made of sun-baked brick. Between this room and the room at the other end of the hut was a kitchen containing two stoves. One was his mother’s, the other that of Mrs. Boros. Between the Boros family and the Martons was a strong social distinction which was the sum of several factors. In the Boros room slept Mrs. Boros, her eight children, her mother, and her sister whose husband had been killed in the war. Mr. Boros, who was a carter, slept in the ox stables. There was nothing strange about that. Mostly the men did sleep outside in the stables, away from crying children and old women’s snores. In contrast to Mrs. Boros’s room, which was noisy and disorganized, Janos’s home was luxurious and contained evidence of education and culture. There were lace curtains at the window. The earth floor was brushed into patterns, and on the walls were pinned two pictures which had been cut from magazines. One was a fashion plate of ladies and gentlemen dancing together; the gentlemen wore gloves and the ladies had feathers in their hair. The other picture, the one Janos liked better, was of a stag drinking from a stream in the Bukk Mountains. When he was very small he would lie in the bed he shared with his mother and grandmother and stare up at the stag. It wasn’t just the animal that intrigued him, it was the great misty background of hills and forest. He had never been away from the farm and, although on clear days one could see the mountains, he had no first-hand experience of the land
scape shown in the picture. Janos’s mother had acquired the picture when working as a sewing girl in the Kaldy farmhouse before her marriage. She had never forgotten the things she had learned there or the things she had read, for there were books in the Kaldy house and she had, in stolen moments, sampled them all. The curtains, her most treasured and valued possessions, had been given to her by Madame Kaldy and represented all that she wanted for her family. They were not new, and a close inspection revealed delicate repairs, but to Janos’s mother they were a symbol of how she must strive never to descend to the level of the Boros family. Mrs. Boros had no curtains, no pictures, and the floor of her room was sometimes never swept at all. Also, Mr. Boros frequently beat Mrs. Boros, one time so badly that Mrs. Boros broke the glass of her window in order to alarm the neighbours, an unprecedented and incredibly expensive alert signal that so shocked Mr. Boros he immediately stopped.
When Janos’s father had first returned from the war he had tried to beat his wife too. Unlike Mrs. Boros, Edina Marton had not screamed or tried to defend herself. She had remained quite still, taking the blows across her face and shoulders with silent fortitude and staring—her blue eyes wide and brilliant—straight into her husband’s face so that finally his hand fell and his fury abated. He mumbled something awkward and ineffectual and then stumbled, ashamed, out of the room. After that he beat her only very rarely.
Mrs. Marton’s blue eyes—eyes that, of her four children, only her son inherited—were a rarity and an object of both discussion and envy on the farm. They placed her apart in the same way that the lace curtains and the pictures on the walls placed her apart. There was talk that she must be the byblow of a farm manager or a bailiff, but no one could be quite certain, for she had come to the farm as a child with her uncle from some place on the other side of the county.
Janos did not know his father until the war ended. When he was three, or perhaps it was four, a soldier had walked into the hut one day. His mother had been working in the fields and Janos had been husking maize with his grandmother. The soldier had stared and then disappeared even as Grandmother cried out and reached her arms towards him. Later he had returned with Janos’s mother and she had given him bread and soup and told Janos that the soldier was his father.
The soldier had come and gone after that; sometimes he was gone for so long that Janos thought he had gone forever and the thought made him happy. Then, late one night, his father had returned looking thinner and more ragged than usual. His mother had begun to cry, saying she was afraid, and the soldier, his father, had sagged wearily as though he too would have been afraid if only he had had the energy. Janos had been turned out of his bed that night and put to sleep with his grandmother in a small bed in another corner of the room. All night there were whispers and sobs, his mother asking why Janos’s father had done something and his father growing more and more afraid. Towards morning the whimpers and scoldings ceased and there was suddenly another sound, the noise of a creaking bed and strange grunts and breathing. These noises had disturbed the boy much more than his mother’s tears or his father’s fears.
In the morning his father had polished his boots and taken him to see Mr. Adam at the farmhouse. He told Janos to wait outside and that was the first time the boy saw that not everyone lived as he did. He had often seen the farmhouse from a distance, but now he was close and had a clear view right down into the kitchen—a kitchen in which the floor was not earth but some shiny, flat stuff, a kitchen with only one stove, but that stove stretching along one entire wall and bigger than both his mother’s and Mrs. Boros’s put together. There were chests and chairs and tables, and the tables were covered with food. He had never seen food like it in his whole life and his empty stomach began to gurgle at the sight of the sausages, the ham, the noodles, the cabbage. An aroma wafted up the kitchen steps, delicious but strange, a brown smell, rich and exotic. He had closed his eyes and the smell had luxuriated throughout his body, giving him the same sensation that lying in the sun gave him. He breathed the heady scent deep into his lungs—and then felt himself knocked down the steps by a giant hand. Just before he tumbled against the kitchen door the hand jerked him back and set him on his feet in the yard. It was his father, standing angry and red-faced and twisting his hat round and round. “Miserable dog!” he shouted at Janos. “Peering into his honour’s kitchen like a mangy hound. Bow to his excellency and ask his pardon!”
Janos had felt himself wrenched forward by one ear. Mr. Adam stood before him. The child bowed and muttered something apologetic.
“Forgive him, excellency!” His father was sweating a little. “This is what happens when a man’s son is left to grow without menfolk to correct him.”
“No harm, no harm,” muttered Mr. Adam. He was staring at Janos and finally he said, “So this is the grandson of old Marton. He was a fine soldier. You should be proud of your father, Marton. He was a brave and loyal man.”
“Yes, excellency.”
Mr. Adam stared at Janos again. “The child is slight, Marton, and the blue eyes—they are not like those of your father.”
“No, excellency. The boy looks like his mother.” He puffed proudly a little. “Edina worked for your mother, Mr. Adam, sir. She was your mother’s sewing girl before the war.”
Mr. Adam made a non-committal noise. He looked away from Janos, past him and out towards the fields and pastures. “Indeed, Marton, indeed. Get along, now. Your place is restored to you, and there is much to be done. The land has suffered in the last years, with only women and children to tend it.”
“Yes, excellency.” He cuffed Janos round the ear. “Bow to his excellency.” Janos bowed.
“I have not forgotten that your father, old Marton, was overseer of the threshing barn,” Mr. Adam said. “We shall see how the crops progress.” He turned away and was nearly back in the house when he suddenly turned again and rummaged in his pocket. He extracted a filler and threw it down the steps onto the ground. “For the child, old Marton’s grandson,” he said, and went into the house.
“Pick it up.”
Janos couldn’t pick it up. He wanted it, but he couldn’t pick it up. His father had called him a dog and that was what he felt like, a blue-eyed dog.
“Pick it up.”
“No.”
His father felled him to the ground with one blow. He picked the filler up.
When they got home his mother was burning a strip of red cloth in the stove. She looked up and asked, “Well?” and then she jabbed hard at the red cloth with a piece of stick until it took light and vanished.
“All well. I am to have my old job back and we can stay here. He promised me Father’s place one day, overseer of the barn.”
His mother’s smile, the easing of lines on her face, was like the transformation the sun achieves on a black day. She looked so happy Janos forgave his father for the lie—not lie but exaggeration—about the threshing barn.
“We are safe then! I have burnt the.... No one need know.”
They smiled at one another and Janos was unhappy. That night the bed creaked and rustled again and he wished his father had never come home.
His father went to work in the granary, and his mother began to have children, girl children. Grandmother nursed them while his mother hoed their strip and tended the pig and the chickens. Every day six eggs had to go up to the farmhouse, and once a week his mother took what eggs were left and walked three miles to the market to sell or barter them. The girl children took what little leisure his mother had left, and now she had no time to tell him the stories she had gleaned from the Kaldy house, no time to tell him about the world according to her interpretation, no time to draw letters in the earth with a stick and tell him that once he had mastered them he would be able to read for himself.
He had his work to do, fetching water, picking caterpillars from the crops, husking maize, but when these tasks were done there was still time left and he wandered away in search of company—and the nearest company was the Boros fa
mily. He was fascinated by them. Their room was dirty and they ate (not often but they did eat sometimes) from bowls without spoons or knives. They didn’t even sit at a table to eat because there was no table. The women sat on the bed and the men took their food outside to eat from the carts. The children just squatted where they were. At first appalled, later envious, he saw that the Boros children were allowed to do many things that he was not. They spat and blew their noses on the ground. They did not wash at all when the weather was cold, and not very much when the weather was warm. They gambled, imitating the young men playing for money on Sundays, only they used pebbles instead of filler. And they swore—how they swore!—rich, earthy epithets that shocked and thrilled him. It was the swearing that finally led to his downfall. The baby was in his charge and she was crying, crying, crying. He rocked her and patted her the way Grandmother did and finally—because he resented having to watch her when he wanted to play with the Boros boys—he became irritated and called her “the poxy mother of a whorehound,” a phrase he did not really understand but which relieved his feelings because he knew it was coarse. His mother, entering the room at that moment, was suddenly still. She didn’t beat him, but her face was sad and her shoulders, already tired from the day’s work, slumped a little more.
“Why did you say those things, my son?” she asked.
He stammered some reply about the Boros boys, his face red, knowing he had done wrong. His mother sat down. She was expecting another child—he knew how to tell now—and as she pushed her legs out in front of her he saw that her ankles were thick and puffy.
“This is my fault,” she said, speaking quietly to herself. “I have allowed the family to slip back, and this is my punishment.”
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