“I dared not go back to school, so I ran and hid near the steelworks. The houses there had no locks on the gates and I hid in one of the yards for two nights. And then I saw Janos, in the morning, and I remembered him because we had gone to see him, Mama and Aunt Malie and I.” His face screwed up again. “Where is my mama, Uncle Leo? What have they done to them?”
“I kept him hidden in my apartment for a few days.” The voice of Janos Marton was cool, sensible, the voice of reason amidst too much emotion. “Then it became dangerous. I was not—unknown to the authorities. There was never any proof, but it was not safe. He came here, in the attic until it was bombed, and then in the cellar. An old woman, dead now, whom I could trust; she helped. I brought food, books. He survived, as you see.”
Survived. One infinitely precious person, son of his cousin, blood of his blood, Cousin Kati’s bastard child—family, someone against whom he could measure himself. He was Uncle Leo again. He had a place and he had a pale, underfed youth to care for. He wanted to hold the boy in his arms, be reassured of a presence, a survivor, someone who should be loved.
“You’re thin, boy,” he said hoarsely, “thin and pale, but we’ll soon get you well again.” They stared at each other, held together by all the faces that were not there, a tiny lost oasis of family on a bombsite. “Come, Nicky, let’s go before the curfew.”
Nicholas turned and, to Leo’s astonishment, put his arms round Janos Marton. “Can I come and see you, Janos? Tomorrow? And you’ll come to see us?” His voice had the desperation of someone clinging to the small fragments of a familiar world. He had two people left, and he needed them both. Marton hugged the boy back and then softly made a fist to his face. “You’ll see me, Nicky. Don’t worry. You can come tomorrow. Perhaps you can help with some paper work. Go along now.”
Leo found he could not speak. He should feel gratitude to Marton for saving the life of his family, his minute family. But the debt was too great. He could think only of Nicholas—his child now, all that was left.
“I—”
“That’s all right. Go now.” The blue eyes glittered, not with tears but with some deeper emotion that Leo didn’t try to understand. He placed his arm round Nicky and propelled him through the yard, looking back once to see Janos Marton watching them, solitary, lonely. Leo had a curious sensation of guilt, as though he were stealing Nicky from him.
“We must hurry, Nicky.” They began to trot over the wet cobbles. After the curfew the Russians shot anyone they saw. Nicky was clinging to his arm and he felt the thin body trembling against him. “Are you all right?”
The boy nodded, too breathless to speak, and Leo realized that he was not only unwell but also afraid of the streets. He had been in hiding for so long he was nervous of sky and spaces. A lump formed in Leo’s chest and with it a determination to get the boy well again. I can get black-market rations. There must be some things left in the upstairs apartment I can sell. If I can buy good food—some meat and butter, perhaps—he’ll soon grow well again.
They reached his apartment, the apartment of an Arrow Cross man who had fled before the Russians, three minutes before curfew. Nicholas stared up at the house, confusion registering on his face.
“Aren’t we going home, Uncle Leo?”
“This is home for me, Nicholas. The other house—the old house—it’s empty, and Grandpa Ferenc’s apartment has been ransacked. It’s better here.”
“But that’s where they’d come, Uncle Leo! Mama and Aunt Malie and all of them. That’s where they’d come. We should go there in case they return and find it empty. We should be there with food and a fire. We should put a light in the window so they know we are there. We—” Leo led the weeping boy through the door and closed it behind him.
Nicholas’s words prevailed. It was foolish to hope that any of them would come back—but if they did, the boy was right. They would go to the old house. He spent several weeks making up his mind, weeks in which he adapted his life to sharing with a fifteen-year-old boy. Together they worked out a new pattern of living, dividing the tasks of queuing for food and keeping their clothes as clean as possible and their bodies as warm as the lack of fuel permitted. Nicholas had been very quiet for the first few days, and then had begun his two recurring themes, their return to the old house and the sayings of Janos Marton. A dozen times a day his sentences began with “Janos says” and “Janos believes,” and although it was natural—so Leo consoled himself—because Janos Marton had been the only human contact Nicky had had for several months, he became increasingly tired and resentful of Janos’s place in his nephew’s life.
But Nicky’s other concern made sense.
The Russians were moving swiftly over the land now. Budapest was taken in January, and as the spring advanced more and more territory was “liberated.” Great sections of the population that had been displaced by the vagaries of war began to drift back to old and familiar haunts. It was difficult not to hope, and with hope came an urge to go back to the old house, to prepare a welcome for anyone who might arrive.
They cleaned out the yard that had been used as a latrine and they washed the stairs and the floors of the upstairs apartment, Malie and David’s apartment. Leo had sold what could be sold for winter food, but there were beds and carpets, chairs and cooking utensils. He even managed to find some unbroken glass which, inexpertly, he put into one of the drawing-room windows. The light streaming into the familiar room gave them a fleeting confidence. Some of them will come back—surely some of them will come back?
It was impossible to travel without the blessing of the Soviet army or some kind of official permission. There were no trains or buses, no postal service or telephones, but in March a miracle happened. They received a letter. The letter was delivered by a huge grinning Cossack who waved it in Leo’s face and then asked for payment. The sight of Adam’s handwriting induced such delirium in Leo that he let the soldier come in and pick what he wanted: an evening coat of Malie’s, a cuckoo clock, and three bottles of wine from Papa Ferenc’s cellar that had somehow been missed during the looting. There was little else to take that could be carried but the Cossack ambled off, seemingly content. The letter, devoured in the light from the single window, spread the family net wider, made them three instead of two.
Dear Leo and Nicholas,
The local committee visited me today to assess my land and, unwelcome as they were, they brought news of you that made me forget their purpose and rejoice. I feared it might be a rumour and no more than that—God knows the world is full of rumours at the moment—but I think it cannot be. You are on the District Committee, Leo, and editing the town’s paper. These details were so prosaic I knew they must be true. They said also that Nicholas was with you. Thank God, my dear, dear friends! You cannot know what this news has meant to me, for if you have survived then perhaps so have others. The knowledge of your safety gives me hope again. I know no details of your survival, only that you are there. It is enough. Please God my beloved wife and children are alive and will come home soon! Your family too, my dearest friends! I try not to think of what the Germans have done—surely some of them have survived.
I will tell you what little there is to tell of myself. Felix and my mother are dead. I have 100 hold of land and the rest has been distributed to the peasants. This you know, of course, Leo, and I do not wish to enter into discussion upon the subject with you. But I have one thing to say—what use is the Kaldy land to the peasants when the trees have been felled for firewood, when every animal has been stolen, when the seed grain has been eaten, and when the Russians are using the old manor as their headquarters? My 100 hold are as useless as everyone else’s and this coming year will see famine in our barren land. God help us all.
News of my family. Eva and the children escaped just before the Gestapo came, but now they are lost to me. They moved west before the Russian advance and I cling to the need that they must be safe—they must be safe. The last time I had news of them, they were with the si
ster of Janos Marton outside Magyarovar.
Leo, I think if they return it will be to you—to the old family house. I hear that sometimes, where the Russians feel so disposed, they will send back a convoy of refugees and deposit them at some central point. This is the only hope for them until we are allowed to travel again. If they come I beg you to use your influence as a Party man and try to get a message to me.
One of the committee men has agreed to take this letter part of the way in return for a bag of flour. I have told him that whoever delivers it will be rewarded lavishly and can only hope you have something that will fit that description. Take heart, my dear friends, for if some of us are still alive then others will be. The war is over and nothing matters—not our differences in ideas, nor the decimation of our land—except that those we love will return to us. Give me news as soon as you can, Leo, and take good care of our beloved cousin, Nicholas Rassay.
Adam
“You see, Uncle Leo, we were right to come back! Otherwise we would not have received the letter. And Uncle Adam says himself that they will come here. They will come back soon, Uncle Leo. They will, won’t they?”
His face was alive, smiling and excited. Leo was suddenly overwhelmed with depression. They both hoped, prayed and hoped, but Leo knew that the hope was thin. The family were not going to return. Inevitably Nicky’s faith was going to be destroyed, his grief was going to be twice as shattering, because he still believed his mama—and all of them—would come back.
“Nicky,” he said tonelessly, “you are fifteen. At fifteen there are some things it is difficult to accept. You still believe that if you want something badly enough you can have it. At fifteen you cannot that believe God could be so cruel as to take your mama when you have done nothing to deserve it.”
The pallid face with the huge brown eyes was anguished, determined not to listen.
“Nicky, we must both try to accept that they are gone—all of them. It is finished. There is just you and me and Uncle Adam.”
“No!”
“Yes, Nicky. What you do with your life from now on must be for the future, a future in which the only family you will have will be me and Uncle Adam, no one else. You understand?”
“I don’t believe you!” He jerked round and ran across the room. “I don’t believe you!”
“Where are you going, Nicholas?”
“To see Janos, my friend Janos!” He was fumbling at the door, trying to grasp and turn the handle. It never had opened properly; Leo could remember Malie’s having trouble with that door. “Janos won’t tell me lies like that! Janos won’t say those things... those terrible things!”
He went, and Leo sat looking down at the letter in his lap. He could tell Nicky that he must not hope. Surely he should tell himself the same thing, make himself accept the loss of all of them. He didn’t want to think about it and so he clung to the one point of positive energy that coursed through his brain, an increasing and jealous resentment of Janos Marton.
38
When he heard Nicky’s feet on the stairs outside his room he experienced, as he always did when the boy came, a soft implosion of pleasure. Emotional reaction, quickly brought under control, shrank into a tiny pinpoint of something that was warm and yet at the same time painful. He recognized the pain, a fragment of an old and much larger sensation. It was the pain of loving someone. He had learned to master it years ago.
The door of his neat, bare room was flung open and young Nicky, red-faced and out of breath, hurtled in. “We have a letter from Uncle Adam, Janos! He’s alive, and he thinks Terez and George and Aunt Eva are alive too!”
“I have told you to knock, Nicky,” he said mildly. “You have no right to enter other people’s rooms like that.”
The boy flinched and rapidly blinked his eyes. His thin wrists sticking out from the sleeves of his too-short coat twisted and he slumped a little, embarrassment in every gawky angle of his body.
Janos shared his humiliation, partly from empathy and partly from memories of his own rejections, and said quickly, “It doesn’t matter. I’m very pleased to see you and I am pleased to know that Mr. Kaldy—your uncle—is safe.”
“Uncle Adam says that Terez and her mother and brother escaped before the Gestapo came. He says they are near Magyarovar with your sister!”
“One of my sisters. The first sister they lived with was in the north.”
Nicky glared at him. “They’ve been with your sisters all the time and you didn’t tell me?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Supposing you had been caught by the Gestapo, Nicky?” he asked gently, and watched the changing thoughts fleet across the boy’s face: anger, insecurity, pride, and finally hopelessness.
“You are right, of course,” he said at last. He slumped across the room, bumping awkwardly into the wooden rail at the foot of the bed and then tripping—on nothing—and overbalancing onto it “I wouldn’t have been brave enough to keep silent. I would have betrayed them. And your sisters too.” A failure, a coward, the Judas of his family. Then he looked up and smiled. “You looked after me very well when I was hiding, didn’t you, Janos? You thought of things like that. I wouldn’t have thought of that.”
The implosion of pleasure and pain again. He had never intended, never wanted, to let anyone be in a position to cause him pain again, and now this gawky adolescent whom he had protected for eight months had become his friend, had made him vulnerable once more. He felt irritated with himself. He should have seen what was happening and used his intellect to guard his emotions as he had on previous occasions when someone threatened to come close. Because the boy had been helpless, afraid, and above all (oh, how well he understood!) nearly insane with worry about his mother, he had allowed a bond to form, a giving and a taking that held them together. And if he was honest he had to admit that it had begun even before he had found Nicky hiding in the derelict yard. It had begun on the day his mother and aunt had brought him to Janos’s room. The misery had begun then, when he watched the boy and his mother and had been reminded of another child with a similar obsession.
And perhaps the roots of the disease went even deeper. It was the family, this particular Ferenc-Kaldy-Racs-Rassay family which he hated but which fascinated and absorbed him. Only this family could have produced a child capable of twisting into the soft underbelly of Janos Marton.
He could have friends now if he wished—unlike the earlier years of his misplacement between two societies—friends who shared his intellectual exercises and admired his achievements. But he had learned, at school and at college and at his uncle, the shoemaker’s, to manage without friends. He had been rejected then; now, without bitterness, he in turn rejected. He had sisters, but he was just as isolated from them as he was from his colleagues. They were awed and a little afraid of him. His sister near Magyarovar had worn her best dress every time he visited her, and once she had almost called him excellency. He didn’t belong to his family any more. They didn’t want him other than as a totem, a symbol of their superiority over the other simple people about them. Once the isolation had been accepted, the condition of belonging neither to one world nor the other had been absorbed, he had discovered that he could manage without family and without friends, that indeed one was stronger without these encumbrances. And then Nicholas Rassay had needed help and suddenly he had found the old remembered craving back in his heart—the need for warmth and intimacy, for love to be both given and received. He had discovered that there were no barriers between him and this child because their conditioning had been the same, isolated from school friends and at the same time separated by circumstances from their own backgrounds. And Nicky had found the same refuge from bastardy as had Janos from poverty, a fierce possessive clinging to his mother.
Their hardening process had been the same, their escape hatch identical, but Nicky had the final and ultimate lesson to learn, the one that refined and hardened and threw out the polished mould of a m
an. He had to accept the maiming blow of his mother’s death.
“They’ll come back—to our house—as soon as they can,” Nicholas was saying. “Uncle Adam believes they are alive and so do I. They are all alive, I know they are.”
“Nicky—”
“They’re alive! All of them!”
Janos remained silent. The lesson was something you could not teach anyone, or even prepare them for. Nicky had to learn this one all on his own. He gazed at the boy and under the thoughtful blue eyes. Nicky grew uncomfortable. He fidgeted slightly on the bed.
“Don’t you want to know if your sister near Magyarovar is safe?” Nicky asked finally.
“Yes.”
Nicky was suddenly off the bed, bounding across the room like a young dog. “Then can’t you go to see her? You could get passes to travel, Janos! You’re important, a hero! And the Russians respect you and let you do all kinds of things that we can’t do. They’d give you passes to get to Magyarovar, I know they would!”
“I can’t possibly go to Magyarovar.” His voice was cold because he was afraid. Nicky was making him become involved with people again.
“Why can’t you? Please, Janos!” Nicky drew breath and then began to speak quietly, controlling himself and trying to talk as an adult instead of an adolescent. “You have done so much for me that I know I have no right to ask more. But I am asking more because I cannot think of anything else. Every night I try to imagine what has happened to them: my cousins, Aunt Malie and Uncle David, my mama. And now Uncle Adam says Terez may be safe! That is why I ask you to go to Magyarovar—please, please, dear Janos! I will do anything for you if you will go and find them!” Young, demanding, proud in so many ways, but not yet proud enough.
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