Csardas

by Pearson, Diane

  Oh, yes, true. But did Adam think that the importance and protection enabled him to feed yet another mouth?

  “I’ll send down some food, whatever I can find,” Adam continued, “but I expect you don’t have too much bother with extra supplies in your position.” And now there was bitterness. “The Party men up at the farm do very well indeed, at my expense.”

  How could he explain to Adam that he did not do very well indeed? Adam—poor, loyal, trustworthy old Adam—didn’t understand at all about the new ways that were coming. He just thought that now there was a new aristocracy. Before the war, he had been one of the rich ones, and now the others, the peasants and Leo, were the rich ones. And because Leo was family he would provide for them all, just as they had provided for Leo in the old days.

  He tried to explain; then his voice died away. A vain, foolish pride refused to let him ask Adam for money or food. He felt torn between his loyalty to the code of family and to his ethics of Party incorruptibility. He kissed his sister, promised to do his best, and then escorted his brother-in-law back to the bus station. It was surprising—shocking—to see Adam (younger son of the land-owning Kaldys) climbing onto a bus amidst peasants, workmen, and the odd Russian soldier. But that was the way it would be from now on, for all of them. No favours, no special treatment.

  “Thank God we have some transport again,” he said to Adam through the glassless window. “Everything is getting back to normal. Soon we shall be able to plan ahead, decide how we are going to live in the future.” He smiled but his brother-in-law did not smile back. As the bus pulled away he wondered why he felt so very miserable, and on the way home he realized it was because he was worrying about the cost of feeding his sister.

  It was Terez who helped. She understood, more than all the others. She came into his room that evening and shut the door so that no one else should hear what she was saying.

  “Uncle Leo, I have found myself work—or rather Janos Marton has found it for me—in the Department of Agriculture at the County Offices. From now on we shall have two salaries to help keep us. And later—who knows?—we may even be able to persuade Mama to go out and try earning a little money.”

  She smiled, and his first reaction was one of infinite relief. He had to control himself from jotting down her prospective income on a piece of paper and allocating it to various expenses. And then he remembered the way she had been brought up, and the way his sisters had been brought up, and who she was—a Kaldy.

  “Will you be able to manage, Terez?” he asked weakly. “I mean, you have never worked—not like that. What will your mama and your papa say?”

  “Oh, Uncle Leo!” she said impatiently. “Do you think we don’t know the world has changed? I’m nineteen years old and I’ve lived through the war! Do you think I’m going to sit at home waiting to get married like Mama did?”

  “Will you know how to work?” he asked, realizing it was insulting as soon as he saw her flushed face.

  “I wasn’t exactly idiotic at school,” she said stiffly. “If the war hadn’t come I was going to persuade Papa to let me go to university, to study biology. I’ve not worked before—not like that in an office—but I think I’m bright enough to learn.”

  “Yes, of course,” he apologized. “It will help considerably, Terez. I don’t have to tell you how it will help.”

  “Nicky and George and I talked about it,” she said. “George said that as soon as his leg was better he would get work too. And Nicky—” She paused. “Nicky came with me to see Janos. He wanted work too.”

  “And what did Comrade Marton say to that?” he asked coldly, resenting the way Marton was interfering in his family affairs.

  “He told Nicky that he wanted him to go back to school, George too. He said that they would be of more service to him in the future if they were trained and educated.”

  Service to him! Not service to the country or their family but to him, Janos Marton!

  “And afterwards, after they’d gone, he told me that he didn’t think Nicky was strong enough to go to work or to school. He thinks Nicky is ill.”

  “Yes.” The fear again, the fear that went with money and food and inflation. “Yes, Nicky is ill.”

  “He’s going to find a doctor to come and see Nicky. A chest doctor.”

  “I see,” he answered bleakly.

  “I’m telling this to you now, Uncle Leo, so that when Nicky begins saying he wants to find some work, you will say what Janos has said—that he must go back to school in the autumn.”

  “Very well.”

  Her frown vanished. She smiled and hugged him. “Uncle Leo, I think I’m going to enjoy going out to work for my living!”

  Eva shrieked and cried, lay on her bed with a wet cloth on her forehead and said her daughter had betrayed her. “Going out just like a factory girl or a streetwalker!” she screamed. Leo wondered how it was possible that his sister was still living in a dream that had died before the First World War. She had spent a year disguised as a peasant, hiding from the Germans. She had survived bombing, the Russian liberation, and the stripping of her husband’s family estate. And yet she was still behaving as though life consisted of nothing more than meeting friends for coffee and going to the dressmaker, the hairdresser, and a succession of balls and parties. He listened, astonished, to her tirade, and he listened, with even greater astonishment, to the way Terez handled her.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Mama,” she said coolly. “No amount of screaming will prevent me from working. If you want to eat, then I must provide food for you, must I not?”

  Eva sobbed, dissolved, said how cruel the world was when a mother couldn’t even afford to indulge her pretty daughter any more. Terez just patted her hand and said, “That’s better, Mama. Much better. Don’t make things difficult for us.”

  “Difficult!” Another shriek. “How could I make things difficult when the Russians have already done that?”

  Another pat, affectionate but also admonitory. “No more noise please, Mama. It will be very enjoyable, going to work every day. And besides”—her dark eyes flashed wickedly—“I may meet some suitable young men at the County Offices! Where else am I to meet men these days?”

  “A fine kind of man you will meet there,” grumbled Eva, but she was quieter, more thoughtful, and later she asked Leo to see if there were any trunks left in the cellars, any of their old clothes that the ransackers had missed.

  “My poor little girl,” she moaned. “No pretty clothes to wear. Going out into the world with no pretty clothes. I want to alter some things, make her a dress—some blouses—anything pretty.”

  An occupation! Something to keep Eva busy and stop her from wailing all the time. He watched her cut and alter, stitch and furbish all the old garments of twenty and thirty years ago. Her complaints changed to reminiscences and he realized that Eva had blotted out the knowledge that her daughter was going to work “like a factory girl or a streetwalker.” Terez was going into society. That her debut involved her going to the County Offices every day at eight o’clock was part of the changing times. But at least she would go in suitable garments.

  From his Party office in the main square he watched her every day, watched her treading lightly along the cobbles, her slender bare arms swinging out in the sun. Some mornings he could see she was singing. He couldn’t hear, but he could see her lips moving and could tell, from the way she walked, that a special rhythm was sending her along.

  It became part of his day, looking at his watch at about 8:25 A.M. and then rising from his desk and going to the window, watching her in the morning sunlight. One morning the phone rang just as he was about to rise and without waiting to hear who it was he just said, “Marton here. Please ring me back in a few moments,” but when he got to the window he had missed the best part of her and she was disappearing into the County Offices.

  She was young, full of hope and energy, and yet there was something old-fashioned about her, something that reminded him of the Ferenc
and Kaldy ladies sitting on their verandas, that reminded him even of his own mother, although Terez was dark, brown-eyed, tiny, where his mother had been fair and tall.

  She still wore her hair in braids at a time when every other girl had short hair curled into the neck. The braids were piled up high and wound round on the top of her head. It made her look just a little taller than she was. And her clothes were old-fashioned. Everyone’s clothes at this time were old and shabby, but Terez wore frocks that looked like dresses of thirty years ago. There was a cream one with a lace collar that made him remember—still with a faint stab of pain—his mother, although he could not think why, because his mother had never owned a dress like that. And then one day, as the sun slanted onto the lace collar, making everything yellow and light, he remembered the cottage and the sunlight shafting in through his mother’s lace curtains, and although the lace of the curtains and that of the girl’s dress were different, the sunlight, the golden shafts, and the feeling of happiness were the same.

  At 12:30, she left the County Offices and walked across the square to the terrace café that had once been the Franz-Josef and was now (as a tribute to their liberators) the Café Moscow. There she ordered a coffee and took from her bag a carefully wrapped parcel containing black bread. He couldn’t see if it were a sandwich (perhaps she had a little cheese?) or just bread, but she bit into it with all the gusto of a healthy nineteen-year-old who never had quite enough to eat. At 1:10 she finished her coffee and walked back to the County Offices. He didn’t see her any more after that because he became very busy in the afternoon and often had to go out on business. But the mornings, and then the lunchtimes, became isolated moments of his life in which he drifted into a past of sunlight and lace that was also the presence of a young woman who had said she was his friend.

  Summer came, the warm, soft, dry weather. It was more difficult to be ascetic, rational, all the time in summer. He had always found it harder to bear his restrictions in the hot months. As a child, sent away from home, the miseries, the loneliness, the insults and laughter had always been harder in the summer. And then as a man, disciplining himself, he had found it encouraged self-indulgence, found it harder to ignore outside distractions and concentrate on plans and policies. One summer he had even indulged in a brief, somewhat torpid affair with a visiting Party member, a thick-set young woman who was five years older than he. The affair had taken excitement from the shared secret fear of arrest and imprisonment that faced them all in those days. But he knew it would not have developed at any other time of the year except the summer.

  And now, this summer, the summer of his success, his climax of achievement after years of ideological struggle, he was drifting into foolishness again—foolishness that he recognized, deplored, but that made him walk down to the Café Moscow one lunchtime and stand beside her table.

  “Hello, Janos,” she said through a mouthful of bread. “Are you going to have coffee?”

  He sat, not answering, disgusted with himself. How pretty she was, how bright and cheerful—no problem of rejection or insecurity—how very much like Nicky.

  ‘“How is your cousin?” he asked abruptly. “How is young Nicky?”

  “He’s resting, like your doctor told him to. He lies in bed all the time and we’ve asked Papa to try and send some fresh food down from the farm if he can.”

  “It would be better if he went and stayed on the farm. He needs to rest where the air is good.”

  Terez stopped chewing, and her eyes clouded a little. “He doesn’t want to go. He gets agitated every time we mention it and makes himself ill—his temperature rises and he doesn’t sleep. Uncle Leo and I thought it better that he stays.”

  “He’s waiting for his mother to come home,” Janos said slowly.

  Terez nodded, staring agreement at him. How huge her eyes were, how soft, like Nicky’s.

  “Why are your clothes so old-fashioned?” he heard himself asking, and then was shocked—shocked because he had asked so personal a question and shocked because it had obviously upset her. A flush spread up from the lace collar and she put a hand up and straightened it needlessly. “I’m sorry,” he said, flustered. “It was impertinent of me. I should not have asked.”

  “They’re my Aunt Malie’s old clothes cut down,” she answered, looking down at the table. “They’re very old—it’s the best Mama could find. I lost my clothes when we went to Magyarovar, and when I came back all my old things were too small.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “I expect I look very funny.”

  “You look beautiful!”

  She was as astonished as he was.

  For a moment they stared at each other across the table, too stunned to say anything more. And then, “Excuse me,” and he rose stiffly from the chair. “I must return to my office.”

  Back in his cool, safe office, with the telephones and the tray of Party papers and the files of everything that had happened in the town, he drew a deep, tranquillizing breath and determined never to speak to her again. When he walked across to the window she was still there—it was 1:15; she would be late!—and when she finally rose and walked back across the square she stopped briefly and stared straight up at his window. She raised her hand in a shy, half movement of acknowledgment, and fully intending not to, he found that he had answered her salute with a wave of his own hand. It was the summer, and the fact that she looked like young Nicky and wore a dress with a lace collar that the sunlight turned to yellow.

  Everyone looked strange and shabby that year. Clothes had been destroyed, stolen, and had worn out, and there were no more. Occasionally you saw a smart, well-dressed woman, but always she was with a Russian officer or in a café with fat men exchanging wallets of mixed currency. Everyone else was worn, tired, and dingy. Women who had been elegant before the war looked like peasants, and peasants looked like beggars.

  Leo, trudging home from the printer’s on a hot September afternoon, wished he still had some of the lightweight alpaca suits, flannel trousers, and canvas shoes of pre-war summers. He was all right. He had a suit—he had found it in the Arrow Cross man’s apartment—but it was thick winter-weight and even without the jacket, just wearing the trousers as he was now, it made him feel heavy and lethargic.

  Mustn’t complain, he thought to himself. How lucky I am, how lucky. He watched an old woman in front of him and thought how hot she too must be, wearing a man’s army greatcoat tied round the waist with string and a shapeless black beret on her head. She looked like a beggar but was probably, he reflected sadly, a peasant or smallholder who had lost everything in the war. She had a bundle—black cotton—that was dragging on the ground beside her. Thin wisps of white hair frayed out from the pulled-down beret.

  The war... the war. That is how we all look, how we all feel, he thought tiredly. She’s worse than some of us, but not really. We’re all like that inside.

  The sight of her dragging along suddenly depressed him and he turned his head away and rushed past her. Repeatedly he found himself unable to believe in the new wonderful Hungary that was going to emerge. There were too many people like the old beggar woman, too many untilled fields, too many wrecked factories, mutilated families. How could any kind of phoenix arise from ashes like these?

  He hurried home, nearly racing, until the sweat ran down his face to lie in thick salty patches around the inside of his collar. Get away from them all—from the newspaper, from poverty, from the shouted unrest of the world—get home to where he was cocooned for a while with people he knew and loved.

  As he opened the door he could hear, whining down the stairs from the upper apartment, the complaining voice of Eva. He screwed his eyes into a grimace of pain, leant against the door and sighed. It had been many years since he had spent any length of time with Eva, since he had gone to Berlin, in fact, and he found it hard to reconcile the transformation of Eva the girl, vivacious if a little spoilt and sharp, to the whining, querulous woman who now filled the apartment
. The war again... the war had done this to her.

  He was still leaning against the door when someone knocked on the outside. It was so unexpected it made him jump away, swearing crossly at yet another irritant in the hot day. When he opened it the old beggar woman was standing there. She’s followed me all the way home, he thought angrily. Someone to beg from. I look as though I’m rich so she thinks she can come here and ask for food and clothing. He glared at the greatcoat tied up with string, at the feet breaking out of a pair of cracked shoes, at the lined walnut face with a complexion as weathered and rubbery as a man’s.

  “Yes?”

  She stared at him, not speaking, but with her lower jaw working and her face breaking down into a welter of ridges and lines. Something cold moved in his stomach.

  “What do you want?”

  A croak that sounded like a word emerged. The terrible face moved and writhed again, toothless, but even in ugliness growing increasingly familiar, frighteningly familiar. And then—

  “Leo,” the face said finally. “Leo... Leo... Leo...” and the old woman stretched her hand out and touched his shoulder.

  “Oh, my God!” he whispered. “Is it you, Malie? Is it you?”

  She nodded. That was all, just nodded. She didn’t touch him again, or try to come in. The hand that was holding the bundle curled tighter round the cloth.

  Malie, bending over his bed with a napkin of delicacies stolen from a party.... Malie with her shoes and stockings off, paddling in a mountain stream with a young hussar officer.... Malie laughing, running through the acacia woods in a soft lawn dress....

  “Malie!” he cried, tears and sweat breaking out together all over his body. “Oh, my God! Malie, Malie!” She stumbled over the step, the terrible face still moving, and he threw back his head and screamed, “It’s Malie! It’s Malie!” and then he pressed his face into the door and groaned, feeling such anguish and pain that he wanted to hurt himself, bang his head against the door until his senses became dead, obliterated in physical sensation.