Csardas

by Pearson, Diane

  After three quarters of an hour she found a cab driver who would take her along the country roads up to the hills. He insisted on payment in advance and she had to empty her purse before he was satisfied. She sat on the edge of the car seat, tense, feeling sick with anxiety and with the constant jolting over the bad roads. What could she say? What could she do that would put it all right? Should she say she was sorry? What explanation had Felix given of her flight from Budapest? She took her hat from her aching head and stuffed it into her bag. There were spasms of blinding light across her eyes and she pressed the fingers against the lids, trying to drive the pain and tiredness away.

  “Can’t you hurry?” she snapped at the driver. “I’ve paid you enough. Surely you can drive faster than this!”

  The driver didn’t answer, but he opened the window of his cabin and spat out into the night. He was already regretting the avarice that had made him agree to drive this madwoman out into the country at night. He steadfastly ignored the impatient noises she was making and began, ruefully, to estimate what time he would get home again.

  The drive through the acacia woods was nightmarish. The lights on the car made a dark and eerie tunnel out of the trees, and several times they saw the red eyes of animals gleaming at them from the side of the road. The driver was swearing quite blatantly now but she was past hearing or caring. In her stomach was a huge hard ball of fear that pressed down on her bladder, making her feel sick and uncomfortable. She resolutely blotted out from her mind any other explanation for feeling so ill. Why hadn’t she waited overnight at Papa’s? Then she would have arrived looking clean and pretty. She would have been able to win him then. What would she do if he wouldn’t take her back? What would she do? Where could she go?

  Screaming directions at the driver she got them at last to the long flat stretch that led to the farmhouse. A light was showing in the bedroom window. God! Supposing he was doing what he had once threatened to do! Supposing he had a girl from the village there with him! The car squealed to a halt and, ignoring the cries of the driver, she was out before the engine had stilled and was running up the steps into the house.

  “Adam! Adam! It’s me! Eva!”

  The bedroom door opened and he stood there, outlined against the light.

  “Adam!” She began to cry, to sob piteously with fear and tiredness. Adam slowly reached his arm out and pressed a switch. The hall was flooded with light and she was able to see his face, stern, immobile except for a small muscle twitching at the corner of his mouth.

  “It’s me,” she wept. “I’ve come home, Adam!” She flung herself forward and then felt his arms go round her, gripping her so tightly that for one terrible second she thought he was going to thrust her away. But then the tightness changed to a violent trembling and when she looked at his face she saw tears filling his eyes.

  “Darling Adam!” she cried, relief draining through her body.

  She could handle all the rest, the questions and explanations, the sorrow and tears and pleadings. She could handle all that, providing he still wanted her. And he did. Oh, it was obvious he did!

  “I’ve come all the way from Vienna in one day. The car driver was angry, I think he wants some more money, but I had to see you. I couldn’t wait another night. I missed you so much, Adam! I had to see you!”

  He buried his face in her neck, and suddenly she realized he was sobbing. Not the way she was sobbing, frightened and tearful, but with deep, wrenching movements that shook his body. For the first time since leaving the apartment in Pannonia Street she felt shame for what she had done to Adam. The shame lasted for a brief moment, and then relief drowned it once more. I’ll make it up to him, I promise I’ll make it up to him. He doesn’t need much. It will be easy to make him happy.

  The driver blew his horn and all the dogs began to bark. “I’ll go and see what he wants,” Adam said. He left her and when he came back he was calm again, the old, unruffled, stolid Adam.

  “We won’t talk tonight, will we, Adam? I’m so tired! It was such a long journey and I was afraid you wouldn’t want me back. I was so worried! Can we just go to bed and talk in the morning?”

  He nodded and drew her forward once more into his arms. He wiped her face gently with one hand as though she were a child. “Oh, Eva, why did you do this to me?”

  “In the morning,” she said. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

  He went down and put fresh coal on the stove himself so that there would be hot water for her to bathe in. And later, tired but refreshed, she crawled into his arms prepared to do what she must do if her return and her future were to be safeguarded. She discovered, to her surprise, that Felix and Stefan Tilsky had made no difference to the way she was with her husband. The Eva who had offered herself to Felix and had subsequently been possessed by Stefan Tilsky seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the dutiful wife of Adam Kaldy.

  Six weeks later, she was able to tell him that she thought she might be pregnant. He stared for a moment, his green eyes unfathomable, and then he kissed her and said that he was satisfied. Fear shot through her when he said that. Satisfied. Why should he choose a word like that? But his behaviour during the months that followed lulled and soothed her anxieties. And when her child was born the following July her relief was absolute, for little Terez resembled only her mother. The black curls and the tiny heart-shaped face were those of Eva and no one else.

  23

  When the day came for him to leave the farm and go away to school, he awoke with a scalding sensation in his bowels. He had to rush outside, and when he came back and lay down again he felt weak and afraid.

  In their corner of the room his mother, grandmother, and three sisters stirred and made little grunting snores. There was a rustle, and then his mother slid from the bed and came over to him.

  “All right, my son?”

  He tried to speak and couldn’t. To his shame he found that his voice cracked, and he stopped trying to speak in case he cried. Eleven years old, nearly a man, and here he was about to cry. His mother sat down beside him on the straw mattress and hugged him close.

  “Only a few months and you will be home again,” she said softly. “Home—and with what tales of learning! What stories of the town and the school, and of Uncle Lajos! We shall think of nothing else while you are gone but the tales you will have to tell us when you return.”

  He put his arms round her waist and buried his head against her side, still not daring to speak. His mother smelt of wood ash, of cabbage soup, of sunflowers, of sweat. He didn’t even recognize it as a smell; it was his mother, warm and secure, his mother whom he was leaving.

  “And what pride you have brought to the family,” she murmured. “Why, even Mrs. Boros spoke with great respect to me yesterday. My son is to go to the school to receive an education.”

  “I shall come back the very moment I have finished the education,” he said, finding words at last. “The minute the school is finished I shall come home here back to you.”

  She hugged him, stroked his hair (newly cut by Aunt Ilonka, ready for school), and said, “Of course, Janni! That is why we have tried so hard to find a place for you in the school. When the education is finished you will come back, and perhaps you will be the accountant or the man in charge of the engines. And then what lives we shall lead!”

  “You will have a bed to yourself and as many pictures as you like, and you will have the best house on the farm!”

  He felt his mother nod. It wasn’t light enough yet to see her, but he could feel her body move. “That’s right, Janni. And I shall be so proud of you!”

  The misery that overwhelmed him channelled itself. Everything must be borne so that soon he could come home and buy the family meat every day. This must be the thing he remembered above all else. He was going away so that soon he could return and buy his mother all the things he had seen in the village.

  And then the fear washed over him again, driving high intention far from his mind. It wasn’t just
the fear and misery of leaving his family, it was fear of the unknown, of a world totally unfamiliar to him in which he would be a stranger without friends or family, at least no family that he knew.

  Uncle Lajos was a second cousin of his father, a man who had done well for himself and had been a credit to the sacrifices made by his parents. He had been apprenticed to a shoemaker and now had his own business in the town, that distant, legendary town where the Kaldys and the Ferencs and the Racs-Rassays came from, the town that included incredible things like the school and factories and hundreds of houses stretched out in rows. Uncle Lajos had married the daughter of a factory hand and their children were all grown up and all placed in brilliant positions of unbelievable sophistication: one was a railway guard; one, who had attended the secondary school, was a government clerk; and another had trained with his father as a shoemaker. Three daughters had all married well to affluent town dwellers. Uncle Lajos had been applied to for lodgings during the term time while Janos was at school. An arrangement had been made: Uncle Lajos and Aunt Berta would take a minimal fee for his keep, and he would have to earn the rest of his food and lodging by working for Uncle Lajos in the evenings and at weekends. At the back of everyone’s mind was the thought that, if the education failed, perhaps Uncle Lajos would keep the boy as an apprentice. So while Uncle Lajos and Aunt Berta were relations, he didn’t know them other than one brief meeting and they were also touched with the Olympian mystery of the town, the mystery that made them distant strangers and not part of the family at all.

  For several months, during the time the arrangements for his departure had been going on, he had been the object of awed envy from everyone on the farm. Not only his schoolfellows but even the adults had spoken to him, of him, as one touched with divine blessing. No one talked of anything else, and his fame had spread from the Kaldy farm to the Racs-Rassay and the Ferenc. He had been pointed out by carter and ox herder, field worker and shepherd, from all the lands about, as the boy who had achieved the impossible and was going to the secondary school in the town. The respect, the reverent humility had been contagious, and for some time he had begun to believe that he was indeed set apart from his friends and relatives. But now, with departure imminent, he was shocked to realize that he was unworthy of the greatness and did not have the courage to grasp it.

  “Mama, what shall I do if”—he choked, fought, and recovered—“if I get lost, or if no one will speak to me?”

  “You will not get lost because in your pocket you have a paper with the address of Uncle Lajos written upon it. And everyone at the school will speak to you because his excellency, Mr. Adam, has arranged for you to have a place there.”

  She had the firm note in her voice, the note he knew meant she would brook no change of plan and weakening of courage. He had heard the note in her voice many times during the last year, when she was talking to Director Feher at the village school, to the priest, to Mr. Adam Kaldy, to any number of relatives all round the county who might be coerced into help, to the Father at the Catholic Gymnasium who said he had no place available for a peasant child. He had heard it above all when she was talking to his father.

  The day they had returned from Mr. Adam’s house, his father had been insane with rage. Subsequently Janos had realized the rage stemmed from fear. His mother’s impertinence could have cost his father his job in the granary. Undeterred, she had stated that Janos was going to receive an education, no matter how impossible it seemed. Through arguments and battles that ended in blows, she had maintained the firm and positive tones that all of them were coming to recognize. She had divulged the amazing news that she had saved money—how and what she could have saved it from was a mystery— to provide clothes and lodgings for her son, enough for one term at least. And finally his father had fallen before a spirit stronger than his own. He had capitulated, and gradually his chagrin had turned to pride. What a wife he had, to accomplish the impossible! And what a son, to receive a place at the grammar school! Once the decision had been reached he had done everything to further his wife’s crusade, dictating the letter to his cousin Lajos and begging rides for his son on carts going towards town on the day that the entrance examination had to be taken. He was proud of his son, and proud of himself. Did not men point him out on three farms as the father of the boy who was going to the secondary school? It was a pride shared by every servant on the Kaldy farm. It put them above all the other farms. There were, it was true, brilliant children on the Racs-Rassay land and on the smaller Ferenc farm; some were fortunate enough to be apprenticed, one or two even spent a little time in the town acquiring mechanics’ qualifications. But on no other farm was there a boy who was going to receive an education at the grammar school.

  Their chauvinism had reached unsurpassed proportions. Uncle Istvan had made a school box for Janos’s clothes. It was of beautiful grooved and fitted wood and the top was carved with his initials. Aunt Rozi had given him a pair of boots that were nearly new, even though it meant that her own son would have to go without during the winter. From Uncle Pal a comb, from Aunt Nansci two handkerchiefs, and so on. He had felt like a prince until this morning, when he felt like an exile.

  His mother left him and went out into the kitchen. He followed her because this was the last morning he would be able to help her get the wood in for the stove. She prodded and blew and finally the full embers glowed again and she moved the pan of soup over to the hot part.

  Yesterday he had been sent down to the river to wash and then had gone in company with his father to thank Mr. Adam Kaldy for the great kindness he was receiving. He was no longer afraid of Mr. Adam Kaldy. During the year since his mother had first gone there he had seen Mr. Adam many times. Once, in the estate office, Mr. Adam had made him stand by the desk and had shown him the account books for the estate. He had explained the columns and the entries and then asked Janos to take a separate piece of paper—beautiful white paper!—and copy the entries and then work out how many hectares of land provided the wheat and the maize and how much milk the herds could be expected to give and what proportion of that could be used in the dairy and so on. Janos had been nervous, but not of the task set him. He had been nervous in case he made the white paper dirty, and in case he disgraced himself by speaking disrespectfully to his excellency. He had begun working on the columns of figures and had finally forgotten about Mr. Adam. This was a far more brilliant and exciting problem than any set by Mr. Feher. He had raced through, checking and calculating and pointing out an error that had been made in the book. When he gave the result to Mr. Adam, his excellency had appeared to be surprised, and Janos wondered if perhaps he had not been careful enough with the paper. But Mr. Adam had said nothing, just sent him home again and told him to return on the same day in the following week.

  Frequently after that Mr. Adam gave him problems to do out of the estate books. Sometimes he also told him not to use certain words as the people in the town wouldn’t understand him. When the time came for him to go to the school and take the entrance examination, Mr. Adam had given him a letter addressed to the director. On the way to the town with his father (they had started before dawn and it had taken four different carts to get there), he had asked a question that had been troubling him for some time.

  “Papa, why is it that there is so much maize and wheat and beet grown on the estate and yet we do not have enough?”

  “How do you know what is grown?” his father growled.

  “I have seen the book, in Mr. Adam’s office. He showed me only one book, but I have seen the others when they were open. Many hectares, much hay and wheat and milk—so much milk. Why is there not enough for us?”

  Usually his father was uncommunicative, sometimes boastful, but mostly terse. That day he seemed to be searching for words, trying to explain something.

  “It is the law,” he had said finally, and then added haltingly, “You must never talk like that in front of other people. It will bring trouble. You must remember that his excellenc
y Mr. Adam is sending you to school because your grandfather fought with him in Russia. That is all you must remember.”

  Yesterday he had thanked Mr. Adam, who had given him three filler. He’d offered the money to his mother when he came home, but she had told him that this time he could keep it. Now it rested in his pocket and the feel of it gave him a small security. With money he wasn’t quite so defenceless.

  He drank some soup and then his mother wrapped a shawl round her head. He kissed his grandmother and sisters good-bye, and he and his mother walked over to the ox stables, where the cart was ready to depart, the oxen already yoked.

  “Good-bye, Janni. Be a good boy.” She gripped him close and he wrapped his arms round her waist again, smelling the dear beloved smell of her for the last time. She was crying; he could feel her body shaking and he could hold his own tears no longer.

  “I wish I wasn’t going! I wish I wasn’t going!”

  “Hush now!”

  She wiped her face with her apron, then wiped his tears away. “Remember, you and I are different, Janni. We have blue eyes. No one else on the farm has blue eyes. So we’ll always be different—different and together—and that is why you must go away to school now and why you won’t cry.”

  Light was beginning to break. He was lifted onto the plank across the front of the cart.

  In the back was a load of manure, which caused his mother to call anxiously, “Don’t lean back and dirty your clothes, Janni. Remember you must be better, cleaner, more industrious than anyone else!”

  He nodded, unable to speak again. He saw his father hurrying from behind the sheds, taking a moment from his work in order to say good-bye.