“What’s wrong?”
He dragged himself to the top step, then silently put his arms round her and laid his head on her shoulder, like a child needing comfort. He had never, in all the years of their marriage, asked her to be the strong partner. He had always been the capable one, the self-possessed husband who coped and made provision for every eventuality. His arms held her tightly and the weight of his body leant down on her.
“What’s wrong?” she said, hysteria mounting in her voice. “What is it?”
“Let us go inside, little one. I have matters to tell you.”
“Money? Have we sustained more losses? It doesn’t matter, David. You know we managed last time. It isn’t important.”
“Not money, little one.” He still, after all these years, called her little one. In some respects, when they were alone together, she was still the child bride, still the young wife he had been so proud to acquire. The endearment suddenly hurt her. She saw how old he was and realized how infinitely precious he was to her, this kind, gentle, sophisticated man whom she had not wanted to marry.
“Tell me! Please tell me what is wrong, David!” The panic in her voice made him straighten his tired body. Immediately he was the old David, the cool, competent man who always had every situation well in control.
“Calm, Malie. We do not want to disturb the boys or Terez. Come now, we shall sit by the fire and talk.”
With difficulty, disciplining herself against hysteria, she took his coat and hat from him, rang the bell for coffee, and poured brandy. He was almost the old David, almost composed and assured, but not quite.
“I have some news of Leo. It is not good.”
“He’s dead!”
“No. Not dead. Or injured. But he was transferred... to a labour battalion, the White Labour Corps. That is why we have not heard from him for three months.”
There it was, the fear, and now almost with relief she let it swamp her. No point any more in fighting it. Now the gnawing anxiety could be openly exhibited. Leo Ferenc, her brother, was in a labour battalion for Christians of Jewish extraction. It was on record. Someone, somewhere, had noted officially that the Ferencs were not pure Magyar. Whatever followed was inevitable.
“So,” she said quietly.
David put his hands over his eyes. His head sank forward a little.
“You understand, Malie, there is nothing to be ashamed or afraid of in joining the White Labour Corps. It is purely to comply with regulations.”
“I understand.”
“Malie, that is not all. Karoly has to go too.”
“Oh, no, David. No!”
“I was told privately... by a friend at the ministry.”
“Not my son! No! Not my son!” The fear exploded inside her. Her son, nineteen, not even to go in the army—that would have been bad enough—but the Labour Corps! First Karoly, then it would be Jacob, swept away, branded... and if the worst happened, if the Germans came in.... She clenched and unclenched her fingers. “There must be something we can do. We are people of importance in this town, respected, responsible for the livelihood and welfare of many! And look how we are related: to the Bogozys, the Kaldys, the Racs-Rassays. Why must my sons be sent to the White Labour Corps?”
“Only one, Malie, only Karoly.”
Karoly, named after her dead love. She rarely thought of that bright, golden young man any more. Now the name Karoly meant a tall, dark boy with soft brown eyes who sometimes called her Mamalie, who was demonstratively affectionate to both his parents, her firstborn, a plump solemn little boy who had always preferred to read rather than play games. Very quietly she began to cry.
“Malie, Malie.” He came across to her chair, knelt, and put his arms round her. “It is not so very dreadful, not like prison. It is the army, just a branch of the army. And if, by forming labour battalions—white, or yellow—we can keep Hitler out of our country, surely it is better....”
His voice was bleak, lacking in conviction, and abruptly she ceased to cry. Karoly was his son too. The implications were as clear to him as they were to her. He knew only too well the danger of possessing Jewish blood. She rested her head against his. The feel of him was so familiar it was only rarely she thought of him as another being. His body was as well known to her as her own. And suddenly the anxiety of her sons receded into a greater anxiety for this man, her husband. “There is nothing else you have to tell me, is there?” she asked, afraid. “You are safe, aren’t you? You don’t have to go away, do you?”
“What would the Labour Corps want with a sixty-four-year-old banker?” he said dryly.
“David, whatever happens, however bad things become, you and I will stay together, won’t we? It doesn’t matter, what happens, but you and I will be together?”
“For as long as we can.”
The fear receded a little, settled into a gentle ache that was never again to leave her. “Is there nothing we can do?” she asked softly.
David shrugged. “I have been trying to find a way of getting us out of the country, all of us: your mama, papa, the boys, even Kati and her son. I thought I might be able to find a way; I had influence in the old days. But there is no way out. We should have gone before, in 1938; it is my fault that I did not foresee all this happening. I should have made provision for you all.”
“Oh, no, my darling! You have done everything for us, always. You saved us after the war, and you saved us again in 1929. You have always looked after us, protected poor Papa’s pride and shown kindness to my silly mama. We owe you everything.”
They rocked against each other. She felt her tears surging up and swallowed them away. What would I do without him? she thought. How could I face life without him beside me?
They took comfort from each other, and the peace that flowed between them formed a brief illusory defence against the fear. Nothing could harm them when they were as close as this.
Later, when emotion had been swallowed into ordinary things—the eating of the evening meal, preparations for bed, the necessary nightly rebuke to Terez and Jacob, who always called to each other from their rooms long after it was time to sleep—they spoke again, but this time more rationally.
“How is it that Jozsef has not been transferred? Why is he still a lieutenant, and Leo in the Labour Corps?”
“I suspect it was too late to do anything about Jozsef. I think his regiment is probably already in Russia. I have not mentioned this to your papa.”
At any other time the news that Jozsef was fighting in Russia would have filled her with anxiety. Now, beside all the other news, it seemed just a minor unpleasantness.
“Why us?” she asked, puzzled. “Why have we been picked out so quickly? There are others like us in town, the Maryks, the Glatz family. They are like us but nothing has happened to them yet.”
“I think—suspect—someone has drawn attention to us, Malie,” he said into the darkness. “Someone has pointed to the Ferencs and the Kleins a little before it is our turn. I received the same feeling every time I approached the matters of special papers for getting out of the country. Someone was there before me, making sure we are blocked.”
“Who would do such a thing?”
“I spoke to Leo on his last leave. He had a theory. He hardly believed it himself, it was so absurd. But do you remember the peasant child your brother-in-law befriended?”
“Janos Marton? Of course, we all befriended him. We gave him clothes and Leo’s old textbooks. Marie even used to feed him sometimes. And he did well. He became a schoolteacher here in the town. You have seen him, David.”
“Yes, I took little notice of him. Perhaps I should have done.”
“But why should he hurt us? He owes us everything.”
“Sometimes it is the very ones to whom we owe the most that we hate the most. Leo told me that he was always aware that Janos Marton hated him, has hated him from childhood.”
“It sounds so foolish,” she said despairingly. “And how could he harm us? A provincial s
choolteacher, a peasant.”
“He writes for the newspapers. He has friends who are minor officials, bureaucrats. It is easy to do. Just a whisper, a name dropped....”
It was insane, mad. Impressions, memories, raced through her head in disorder, trying to weave logic out of a sequence of irrational events. She was tired and her head ached with trying to understand, trying to reason what they could do to save themselves. She felt David’s hand in hers finally begin to relax. Let him sleep, poor darling; he has worked and worried for us for so long. Let him sleep.
The turmoil in her own brain continued, grew worse. One thought emerged clearly, a piece of good common sense. Terez must go home. If the Ferencs and the Kleins were marked, Terez would be safer up at the farm with her father’s people. Adam would be able to protect her better than David, for the simple reason that Adam was not Jewish. Terez, whatever the hazard to her education, must go home.
“But why must I go home? I’ve only just come back for the new term! I need to study for my Abiturium! And the school play. I was to have the lead in the new play, and Jacob has promised to take me skating when the lake freezes. I don’t want to go home!”
She looked so much like Eva that Malie had a sense of time telescoping: Eva at the end of a ball—“Uncle Sandor has come, Eva”—“But I don’t want to go home!”
“Darling, you know Uncle David and I love having you here. We shall hate to lose you. But we feel you will be safer with your papa. The war—”
“You mean because Uncle David is Jewish?” asked Terez slowly. Her brown eyes stared hugely into Malie’s, trying to be brave but showing the first glimmer of the now recognizable fear that hovered over all of them. “Nothing could happen to us, could it, Aunt Malie? Everyone at school says we’ll be all right if Horthy can keep the Germans out. I think he can, don’t you?”
“I hope so, dear. But I still think you should go home. It isn’t just your Uncle David; there is Grandfather Ferenc too. You do understand, don’t you, Terez?”
The girl was still. She sat lifeless in the huge carved chair they had brought with them from their Budapest apartment. Everything around them was rich, luxurious, in perfect taste. It seemed ridiculous to be talking about danger in this comfortable drawing-room.
“Terez, if you go home to your papa and your grandmother Kaldy, people will not be constantly reminded of... of the other side of your family.”
“I understand, Aunt Malie, they wouldn’t hurt Uncle David, would they? I couldn’t bear it.” She choked a little and stared hard out of the window. “No one would want to hurt Uncle David, would they?” All the youth, the spirit, was drained away from her. She looked at Malie, her face entreating the comfort she had always been given as a child. But now she was no longer a child and there was no comfort to offer. Malie turned away, unable to watch her destruction.
“When you get home, Terez, try to talk to your papa about... everything. Your papa will know what to do, and you must help him. Your mama—your mama isn’t very sensible. You must try to see that she does everything your papa tells her to do. It’s important now.”
Terez didn’t answer. Her face, over the navy-blue school skirt and blouse, was white.
“What about the rest of you?” she asked suddenly. “Grandpapa and Grandmama and Karoly and Jacob. And little cousin Nicky, what will happen to him? He has only Aunt Kati to look after him.”
“Uncle David will look after all of us.” She choked. “He will care for us all. You are not to worry.”
Terez rose, put her arms round Malie and hugged her once, very fiercely, before running out of the room. Malie heard her feet on the stairs and then the door of the house slammed. She crossed to the window and watched her hurrying under the branches of the bare wet trees, down the street towards the square. Going to meet Jacob from school, she thought tiredly. Perhaps it’s as well she’s going home, quite apart from the war. Foolish to have cousins, only two years apart, living in the same house. Perhaps that’s why she’s so upset.
She watched the two of them that night at dinner. They were quiet, sitting next to each other, as close as they could without disarranging the placing at the table. Jacob, her son, was always quiet, but now his stillness had a heavy despondency about it. Terez had obviously been crying.
So that’s it. Now it begins all over again, the loving and the suffering. You think your children will never feel pain the way you felt it, and it happens all over again.
When Adam came the following Sunday to take his daughter away, she noticed that Jacob wasn’t there with the rest of them to wave the car on its way. She glanced up and saw his face at the window, staring with all the intensity of an eighteen-year-old about to be bereft of his love. And she felt only relief that Terez was going away before the affair could spring into something violent. This was no time to have to cope with the problem of cousins falling in love.
She thought a long time before going to see Janos Marton. She spent hours at night, brooding, imagining, trying to get inside the mind of a man who could hate the very family who had helped him to rise from the poverty in which the rest of his kind lived. What kind of man could hate like that, sustaining it over the years, waiting for revenge? She tried to relate it to herself. Whom had she ever hated? Papa, yes, during the first war, oh, how she had hated Papa for the pain and hurt he had caused her, the cruelty and the punishment he had inflicted on her because she had fallen in love. But she did not hate Papa any more. As she grew older she had begun to understand him, and now she felt sorry for him, for him and for her silly mama. She tried to remember what she could of Janos Marton. He and Leo had had some extraordinary feud that had begun with the death of Uncle Sandor. Leo had been unbalanced about that. She recalled a scene at someone’s wedding—Kati and Felix’s—Leo kicking the child’s father, the child hitting back. But what could have turned a boyish skirmish into a man-sized desire for revenge?
It was easy enough to find out where he lived. She was a Ferenc. She had only to telephone someone at the County Office and within a very short time a courteous clerk called her back with an address on the industrial side of the town. At the last moment she asked Kati to come with her. If Janos Marton hated her family because he felt underprivileged, because he considered that Leo had ill-used him in some way, then Kati might be able to help. No one had been more ill-used than Kati, and all it had done to her was make her detached, given her an air of abstract isolation that only a few people could penetrate.
She took a tram to the Racs-Rassay house. It was shabby and run-down now; how ashamed Aunt Gizi would have been. Kati and her son had a bedroom each, ate in the huge old ground-floor kitchen, and lived in the room that had once been the old drawing-room but was now Kati’s studio. All the other rooms were shut and draped in dust-sheets. A woman came in once a week, tried to clean, and took their clothes away to wash. Kati and her son went out to lunch on weekdays in a rather weird café close to Nicholas’s school, and on Sundays they came to lunch with Malie and David. When Malie saw Nicholas at her luncheon table she wondered if he had enough to eat the rest of the week. She suspected Kati was an unreliable and erratic caterer. But whatever their private living arrangements they seemed to be devoted to one another and very happy.
When she arrived at Kati’s she felt a faint twinge of embarrassment. Kati was getting so odd, shut away with only her paints and her son for company, that sometimes, as on this particular occasion, she didn’t seem to notice what she had put on. She was wearing an old fur coat of Aunt Gizi’s, a sealskin that had been fashionable thirty years ago. Her feet were thrust into leather boots and round her head was a red silk bandeau with a bunch of poppies pinned at the side.
“Will you be warm enough, Kati?” she asked carefully, staring at the bandeau. “It is very cold outside and you really need a hat.”
“Red is a lovely warm colour.” Kati smiled. “Nicholas is coming with us. I thought on the way home we could go and have tea somewhere. He loves having tea with you, Mali
e.” Her eyes clouded over a little, then brightened again. “You don’t mind, do you?”
She did mind. She was tense and worried enough without having to think about what she was saying in front of Nicholas. But Kati’s face was so eager and confident she could do nothing but nod and smile back.
Nicky came racing down into the kitchen and flung his arms round her. He was a demonstrative and affectionate child, the way Kati had always wanted to be but never had. Every time Malie saw the boy she felt the same sense of shock that Nicky was so very handsome. Even at twelve he didn’t seem to suffer from the legginess, or the awkwardness, or the skin ailments of most boys. He was neat and handsome, with a soft endearing smile and a permanent expression of excitement, as though he was always expecting something nice to happen to him.
“I’ve had a letter from Uncle Leo!” From his pocket he took a worn, creased envelope and waved it at her. “Uncle Leo is serving with some very interesting people, Aunt Malie. He has a doctor with him, and a man who was in the government, and a newspaper owner. He says after the war he will take me to Budapest to meet them all!”
Leo, dazzling the younger generation again, even from a labour camp. He had enchanted Karoly, Jacob, Terez, and George, and now Kati’s son was going to be bewitched by the family rebel.
When they went outside Nicholas took the letter very carefully from its envelope and walked ahead of them, reading it silently to himself. The two women shuffled along in the slush, Malie, tall and neatly dressed, still smart and attractive in spite of her pre-war clothes, and Kati, clinging to her arm, slipping and laughing, with the red poppies becoming damp and bedraggled as the damp got to them.
“Sometimes I wonder why I’m so happy,” she confided to Malie. “I shouldn’t be, not at all. I’m a ‘disgraced’ woman and no one really wants the embarrassment of having me in their home. And the war is frightening for people like us; we don’t know what is going to happen—oh, Malie, don’t shiver like that—and yet I am happy, very happy.”
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