Csardas

by Pearson, Diane

  When he awoke the next morning he had all the depressed remorse of the drunkard, now sober. His head ached and every time he raised it from the pillow the room tilted at a sickening angle. He tried to remember what his elation of the night before had been and finally recalled that it had been no more than a list of names and addresses of people he could contact at home. Just another collection of people, he supposed bitterly, who went to their favourite café when work was over and whispered of the reforms they would like to make.

  By his pillow was the crumpled piece of paper that had been thrust into his hand upon leaving his comrades. With his eyes screwed against the light from the window he smoothed the paper and read the names. The one at the top of the list was Janos Marton.

  30

  They met in a café on the poorer side of the town, between the garrison and the steelworks. He had lived a large part of his life in this town but he had never visited this particular street or café before, and he stared curiously at the shabby apartment houses opposite the café—chipped stone buildings with stairs covered in litter leading to the upper floors. A girl selling matches and bootlaces hovered outside the café entrance.

  Janos Marton stood up as he entered. He was a polite young man. He held his hand out and Leo, after a moment’s pause, took the proffered palm in greeting.

  “How nice to see you again, Mr. Ferenc,” said the young man brightly. He had nearly, but not quite, lost the accent of the puszta. He waited for Leo to sit, then sat himself and ordered beer.

  “I would prefer coffee,” said Leo disagreeably, and the young man smiled and said, “Of course,” and changed the order.

  They sat in silence until the waiter returned. Janos Marton was still very thin, but now his thinness had a hard whipcord quality about it. His dark blond hair was cut and combed neatly about a strong but finely boned head. Blue eyes, carefully guarded, gazed from beneath long, almost girlish lashes. He could have been good-looking were it not for the tenseness, the feeling of muscle drawn against muscle in preparation against constant attack.

  “I hope it was not inconvenient for you when I telephoned your home,” he said politely. “I had a message from Mr. Roth in Budapest. He said you were coming home for a short period and that you would be exactly the right person to meet our requirements.”

  Absolutely self-possessed, the little peasant boy whose father drank and stole, whose mother carried him to school on her back and begged for a place at the Gymnasium. Self-possessed... and inhumanly cold. Leo suddenly longed to smash the self-possession.

  “How are your parents?” he asked cruelly. “Are they still working on my brother-in-law’s farm?”

  “They are dead. Thank you for your inquiry. My mother died just before I qualified as a teacher. She had cancer. My father died last year. He drank too much, fell in the river, and subsequently died of a chill—pneumonia, I imagine. Your parents are well, I believe, Mr. Ferenc? I see them occasionally when I am in that part of the town.” The face was dispassionate, the eyes blank, the lips drawn back in a controlled mask.

  “I’m sorry to hear of your mother’s death. I believe you were very attached to her.”

  “All only sons are attached to their mothers.”

  “I heard from my sister that you were intended for the village school. I believe they were all most disappointed when you refused to take that post?”

  “I believe they were.”

  “And now you are teaching here? In the town?”

  Janos Marton bowed his head in acknowledgment. “There is much to be taught here,” he said lightly, “which is why I contacted you, Mr. Ferenc. I organize one or two little educational schemes in this part of the town, and we would like you to give a series of informal—secret—lectures if you would. Mr. Roth said he could think of no man better informed for our needs.”

  “What kind of lectures?” Leo asked sullenly.

  “On Marxist doctrine. To the workers in the steelyards.”

  There was a little damp clutch of fear in Leo’s stomach. Janos Marton was serious. He was quietly asking Leo to preach heresies against the government in a steel factory. This was different, very different, from all the other things he had done. The articles in Gondolat, the boisterous conversations at the Balasz, the defiant declaration of his views before his reactionary colleagues on the paper—all these things were like the bragging of a child compared with Janos Marten’s request.

  “Are you aware of the risks you’re running, organizing this kind of thing?” he asked, trying to appear as cool and disinterested as the young man on the other side of the table.

  “Of course, Mr. Ferenc. But you have more to lose than I. It would not be sensible for you to agree to do this unless you are sure of your principles.”

  Principles? What were his principles? In Berlin he had had many of them. He had gone raging into the streets with his principles emblazoned on a banner and had got his ribs kicked in and his mouth bloodied in order to defend them. He closed his eyes—always his way of thinking deeply—and called back a vision of himself at twenty-two, standing with a spear of glass in his hand, ready to fight the Nazis singlehanded. And what had he done since then? Written a few left-wing articles in intellectual magazines and talked theory with his friends. He was twenty-eight. Had the fire left him already? He opened his eyes and stared at the young man before him. Controlled, tense, clever, Janos Marton would never fight in the street, would not let emotion carry him tear-filled into passionate causes.

  “You are very disciplined for one so young,” he said tonelessly.

  “Thank you, Mr. Ferenc.”

  “You were not always so disciplined. There were many times, when we were young, when you hated me, would have killed me if you could.”

  “But surely, Mr. Ferenc, one learns that violent emotions are cruel things to carry about. They can so rarely be released.”

  “It is not always easy to be that rational.”

  The blue eyes flickered very slightly. A glimpse of fury—anguish? what?—stared out and was instantly controlled.

  “One learns to be rational, Mr. Ferenc. One learns very quickly when one is a peasant child, especially the only peasant child in a school of middle-class pupils. Nothing teaches self-discipline so quickly, or the power of intellect over emotion.”

  Twenty-two years old and a monster, a machine of cold calculations.

  “You don’t hate me then? For kicking your father when he was drunk, for seeing him beaten by the pandur, for riding on a horse when you walked through the snow without shoes, for eating when you were hungry?”

  “I don’t hate you, Mr. Ferenc,” Janos Marton said quietly. “I hate the system that made you.”

  Twenty-two and a man, while he was twenty-eight and a spoilt child compared with this soul-scorched creature who had learned to live with himself and his passions.

  “I will give your lectures, Janos Marton. Until I am called to the army, I will help you in any way that I can.”

  Again the blue eyes flickered, not in warmth but satisfaction. “We speak to no more than nine or ten at a time; otherwise it is not safe. We use the room behind this restaurant and if anyone asks why we gather on certain evenings it is to play cards and gamble a little.”

  “I understand.”

  “I shall be with you at first; then we work separately. It is safer that way.”

  “I understand,” he said again, although a flux of fear suddenly made him long to back out.

  Janos Marton rose from his chair and again extended his hand. “I must leave you now. School begins again in a few minutes. I will telephone you when we are ready to begin.” He hesitated as though weighing the wisdom of imparting further knowledge. “Your name—your family name—is important to us in this town, but that is not why I have asked you. I have read your articles in Gondolat and I recall what they said of you in Budapest. Your beliefs are sound, Mr. Ferenc. And you are honest. Also your way with words is skilled, highly skilled.”

 
“Thank you.”

  Janos called the waiter over and paid the bill. Leo let him, although he knew the schoolteacher earned a pitifully small wage. He realized it was a way of righting the balance. It wiped out the child with sores on his feet and the frail woman carrying that same child to school on her back.

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” he said again as they stood to leave. “I remember her very well, a tall, blue-eyed woman. My brother-in-law was impressed with her courage.”

  The face of the other was turned away so he could not watch to see if the blue eyes moved. There was just the toneless voice. “Yes, she had courage, especially at the end.”

  Leo sensed suddenly that the tense body was too tense, the stillness too still, and he was alarmed in the way he had been alarmed when small by Papa’s silent rages. “I will wait for you to phone me,” he said hurriedly, and the other nodded and walked through the door of the restaurant.

  Leo watched the schoolteacher walk away, strong and lithe, like an animal. His suit was cheap and badly cut, and it hung shapeless from square-boned shoulders. Above the frayed collar Janos Marton’s neck was pathetically thin. It was the neck of a vulnerable, defenceless child who has no friends. Leo felt sorry for him as he had felt sorry several times in the past. But this time his pity was tempered with caution.

  Three weeks later, packed into the back room of the café with eight men smelling of sweat and salami, he began to talk on Marxist doctrine. His audience was sincere but ill-educated. It was a radical change from the intellectual exchanges at the Balasz, for now he had to simplify, and simplify yet again. Janos Marton had impressed upon him that they did not want fiery rhetoric or impassioned calls to the blood. These men were to be educated in sound, practical theory that they could understand and use in argument. Leo did his best, but by question time he was sweating with the effort of thinking with their minds and talking with their tongues. They were very nervous and respectful at first. He was a Ferenc and they called him sir, and on one occasion even excellency. But as the evening progressed, and the stink of sweat and sausage combined with that of cigarette smoke, their hereditary respect faded and they bombarded him with stolid, sometimes stupid questions. He stood it for two hours more, then drew the evening to a close with the final authority of the teacher. In the street outside the café he drew a deep breath and shook his head.

  “The smell of the proletariat is unpleasant, is it not?” asked Janos Marton behind him, but he was too tired to reply and he just said good night and walked away. He sensed Marton looking after him, could almost feel the cold eyes on his back.

  After the third lecture Janos didn’t come any more and, curiously, he felt lost and a little helpless, shut up with eight or nine men from the steelyards and no interpreter to help him. Marton explained when they next met that he now considered his presence unnecessary at the talks.

  “You don’t think, from the question of morale—for them and also for me—that your presence might be useful?”

  Marton considered. “No, I have listened to your talk—the same talk—for three nights, and now you are quite capable of dealing with them. Morale is not necessary.”

  At the sixth lecture there was a man whose face, for some reason, stayed in Leo’s mind. Mostly the faces of the steel workers were the same, heavy and square-jawed with hair receding from temples and eyes blunted with tiredness and the effort of understanding Leo’s words. The new face was different, sharper, with bright alert eyes. Leo waited for the questions, certain that this man would ask things that he could enjoy answering. The face was keener, more alert, capable of reasoning and calculation. He was disappointed when, at the end of the talk, the man just rose and left the packed room. Leo, smitten already with the conceit of the inspired teacher, felt betrayed. His gift of knowledge, imparted with patient care, had been rejected by a man who obviously understood what Leo was saying. Despondent, disillusioned with the task he had been given, he walked home through the warm summer rain, hoping illogically that his call-up papers would come soon so that he could leave this town he was beginning to hate.

  The following morning, as he opened the door of Papa’s apartment to leave the house, he discovered the man with the bright intelligent face standing outside the door. With him were three policemen.

  “That is him,” said the keen-faced man. “I do not know his name, but he gave a lecture on Marxist doctrine to nine men from the factory last night, in a restaurant on Vorosmarty Street.”

  One moment later, without even having time to tell anyone in the house, he found himself in a car being taken to the police headquarters.

  Through the days that followed he wanted desperately to ask if they had arrested anyone else, but he dared not. They were watching, questioning, waiting to see if another political dissident was involved. He knew it was only his family name that prevented them from beating further information out of him. He said he had been approached by a stranger and asked to talk to the factory hands. He described the stranger again and again, taking a wary, private amusement from his description—a short swarthy man with a German accent—which exactly fitted the town’s leading magistrate. He knew it was possible that Janos Marton was lying in another cell also awaiting trial, but he dared not ask in case his query led to Marton’s arrest.

  At the end of the week he was called into court, and there, in the presence of David Klein and a stranger from Budapest, he was released on bail. David drove him home, but even then he found he was unable to mention Marton’s name. He had, in the last days, denied all knowledge of the man to himself, and now he could not break his self-erected barrier.

  Papa did not speak to him; Mama cried all the time. Jozsef was out, deliberately out, Leo thought with idle amusement. He was taken straight upstairs to Malie’s apartment and here he was told that the stranger from Budapest was a barrister, a friend of David’s, who was going to handle this case.

  “If we keep matters here, in the town,” David explained carefully, “you should receive no more than a heavy fine. It is a local matter, a provincial matter, and we are known and respected here. Mr. Elek is the top man for this kind of case. With the town feeling lenient towards us, and Mr. Elek’s brilliant record in court, we should be able to prevent a sentence of imprisonment. But we must keep it local. We cannot vouch for what might happen if it goes to Budapest.”

  Only then did Leo manage to ask, “Was anyone else arrested with me? Was anyone else involved?”

  “Seven other... Marxists. There has been a sweep in the town. You are the only one connected with the factory.”

  “The seven?”

  David, in a dry, toneless voice, named the others. Two of them Leo recognized from the list given him in Budapest.

  “Did anyone come forward while I was in gaol?”

  “No one.”

  Illogically he felt betrayed. Why had Janos Marton not come forward to share his danger? And then he remembered the cold logic, the reason that mastered everything else, and he knew that Marton would never risk practical considerations for a quixotic gesture of sacrifice.

  At the trial he saw the schoolmaster once, standing at the back of the court studying with dispassionate interest the process of legal machinery. He stared at Leo as a stranger stares, without interest, and the coldness of the blue eyes generated a sudden chill in Leo’s heart. Was it possible he had been the victim of a malicious, vengeful plot? Had the peasant child carried hatred in his heart all these years, in spite of his avowals to the contrary? Leo tried to discard the notion. No one could be that bitter, that unintelligent, but every time he looked at Janos Marton the idea festered. Why had the spy come on a night when he was alone? He pushed the thought away but the seed was there.

  Mr. Elek proved to be worth the large sum of money David was paying him. Leo was fined, released, and informed by the court that during his military service he would be barred from the promotion usually given to people of his background. He had forfeited his privileges and must now take his chan
ces with the proletariat he had sought to befriend.

  He gave David Klein the remainder of the savings he had managed to accumulate in Budapest, insisting that it would pay part at least of the legal fees. The only aspect of shame he felt in this entire business was the fact that family money had been used to free him from trouble. If he had been Janos, what would have happened? Gaol, he supposed, for an undefinable period.

  A month later he received his papers and reported to barracks, pleased to be out of the house where Papa’s disapproval and Mama’s tears coloured every moment of the day. Once more he was informed, this time at the barracks, that he had no possible chance of promotion, not even to non-commissioned ranks, but by now he no longer cared. Hitler had moved into Poland and the refugees were pouring over the border. Beside that everything else seemed unimportant.

  31

  Nervously, casting worried glances over the borders towards the three newly conquered vassal states of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, Horthy’s Hungary began to tread the delicate path between preserving its independence and placating the monster of the Third Reich. It was necessary to be not so stalwart an ally as Italy, but not as defiant as Poland, to offer a little but not too much, to support in theory and brave words their gallant German allies, but yet refrain from actually declaring war on Hitler’s enemies.

  The balancing act was assisted because of the very nature of Horthy’s parliament. For nearly twenty years the land had been governed by a strict and rigid regime, set in traditional lines. It was easy to tilt just a little more and convince Hitler that this particular country of Eastern Europe was safe in the Axis block. The Arrow Cross men, now a strong Hungarian Nazi group, were given a little more prominence. So was anti-Semitism and the crushing of moderate and left-wing elements. It was the price that had to be paid to keep Hitler from swallowing their land as he was rapidly swallowing all the other lands of Europe.