“Malie, my darling, why do you eat so much?”
“I am hungry.”
What could he say? What could any of them say? The eating was better than the weeping, though sometimes he thought it was the same.
In January she came out of her room one morning dressed in the greatcoat tied up with string.
“I need money, Leo,” she said quietly.
He thought she was going in search of food again. “How much?”
“I need the fare to Budapest.”
“Later, Malie. Perhaps in the summer I will take you to Budapest. It is not a good place to go now.”
“You think I am mad, Leo,” she said gently. “I am not mad. I am going to look for my sons. Mrs. Hofer has said there is a place in Budapest where one can find news of soldiers who went to Russia. Karoly—remember he was in the Labour Corps—he was in Russia. Perhaps he has come home, perhaps he is sick somewhere, or a prisoner. I must go and look for him. And then Jacob. Someone must have news. I can ask everyone, all those who came back.”
“You can’t go now, Malie. Wait until the weather is warmer.”
Very gently she began to cry. “All the time, in the camp, in the factory, I prayed to God: ‘Please let one of my sons be alive, just one.’ I did not pray for David or for Mama and Papa—even then I knew it was no good—but if only one son is left, I said, just one son—” She put her hand to her mouth. “Give me the money to go to Budapest and look for my son.”
He was afraid to let her go alone, so he gave them both the money, Eva and Malie. Eva made her remove the man’s coat and wear something she had bartered from the refugee family below. He saw the two of them to the station, wondering just what fresh catastrophe might occur to them in the war-torn capital, and with the Russians still swarming over the land. He was mad to let them go, but it would have been worse to have prevented her.
They were gone for two weeks and returned tired and sad. There was no news, but Malie had heard of someone at Debrecen whose son had returned from Russia, from Karoly’s Labour Corps. She rested a few days, then went to Debrecen, and returned without news except that a man in Eger had been a prisoner of the Russians, captured just where Karoly was stationed.
She stopped eating now. She became thin again and every few days—weeks—he saw her to the station, sometimes with Eva, sometimes without. Every time she returned she was a little more tired, a little more sad, and yet with each hopeless trek he sensed that something of the old Malie was returning. She was tired and old now—she would always be that—but beneath the sorrow and hopelessness was sanity.
There came a day in April when she said to him, “Your chest is better now, isn’t it, Leo?”
He looked at her carefully, wondering if once more she was thinking of her year in the camp, of some old ailment that had afflicted one of her fellows.
“Your chest,” she said again. “Don’t you remember, Leo, when you were a boy you had a weak chest and had to go and spend the winter with Eva and Adam at the farm. Don’t you remember?”
Relief flooded over him, relief and with it joy, because this was the first time she had spoken of anything except her sons or what had happened to her.
“It was Nicky coughing in the night,” she said. “It reminded me of when you were ill and I wondered if we could send Nicky to the farm.”
“Adam says it is not safe. The Russians are headquartered in the old manor and everything is very difficult.” The difficulties that he did not want to worry her with were the increasing bad feelings between Adam—a relic of the old aristocracy—and the local committee. There was no knowing how long Adam would be in possession of what remained of his land.
“Why don’t you speak to your influential friend?” she asked gently. “He has done so much for us—for Nicky—perhaps he would help us now.”
“Janos Marton?”
She nodded. “I was so foolish, such a silly woman,” she murmured. “I thought it was him giving us away to the Nazis. I went to ask him to leave us alone. I was so foolish. Nothing could have stopped what was happening, nothing.” She began to cry again and he wanted to calm her, before the weeping brought back madness.
“All right, Malie, I’ll talk to him.” He wanted to ask no further favours from Marton, but against his sister’s melancholy and his nephew’s sickness he had no choice.
There had been changes at Party Headquarters throughout the winter. He had been so busy with Liberation and with his family that the changes had only made a dim impression on him. A new comrade had come down from Budapest, and then another. He had met one but his appointment with the other had been cancelled, he could not remember why. There had also been a guard placed on the door of the Party offices, some kind of security check, but again he had thought little of it during the passing months.
When he went to see Janos Marton he was surprised to see two guards on the door, neither of them the rather genial middle-aged man who had stood there throughout the winter.
“Where’s Mikos?” he asked, surprised, but received only a demand to show his card. He began to grow annoyed. It reminded him of the war when one was constantly having to show one’s papers.
When he went into Marton’s office he attacked without preamble. “Why do we have the pandur on our doors now? I thought the old days were dead!”
Marton didn’t answer, but Leo caught a fleeting spasm of annoyance cross his face. Annoyed with whom? With him or with the guards?
“It’s a new... precaution,” he said tonelessly. “Comrade Lengyel gave orders.”
“Lengyel?”
“From Party Headquarters.”
“Oh. I see.”
He didn’t see, and they stared at one another blankly for a moment.
“What did you want?” Janos Marton asked.
“Ah, yes.” He sat down. Marton had not asked him to but he put that down to forgetfulness, or the fact that his manners were bad. “It is about... about young Nicky. His chest is still very weak. My sister—my sister who was in Germany—she noticed it this morning and asked if there was no way he could be sent to the country. She wanted him to go to my brother-in-law’s farm, the Kaldy farm. Ah! But of course you know where I mean.” Sometimes when he was in Marton’s office he forgot that they both came from the same family estate. It was a genuine mistake but Marton stared coldly, as though suspecting him of jeering.
“Of course I know it,” he replied coolly. “And I do not think it would be wise for Nicky to go there. Quite apart from anything else the farm is not high enough. He should go to the mountains, to a sanatorium.”
Leo snorted. “A sanatorium? In these times?”
“It may be possible. Not a sanatorium, no, but a place to live up in the mountains.” He paused and stared down at his desk. “Matrafured. It is possible I could find a place for Nicky to stay in Matrafured. But one of your sisters—or Terez—would have to go with him. Two rooms in a house. They would cost nothing; that I could arrange. But someone must go to look after him.”
“When will you know?”
“A week, possibly less. I will come and tell you.”
He hurried home, a plan fizzing at the back of his mind, a plan based not on logic or even hope but on a vague instinct that this—this of all things—might help not only Nicky but also his sister Malie.
Over the supper table he explained Marton’s proposition. Before anyone else could say anything, he rushed on. “I do not think we can spare Terez. She is earning money here and if Nicky is to go to the mountains we shall need money. The rooms may be free, but the food will not be. Someone must work and send money for Nicky. So that leaves you, Eva, or Malie.”
Eva looked unhappy. “I’ll go, of course, Leo. But then I have my duty here, to my children. Who will look after them? George is still at school, and Terez—Terez is of an age when a girl needs a mother’s care. But of course I will go where my duty lies... if only I knew where my duty lies!”
“Your children are hardly babies, Eva,�
�� he could not refrain from saying. “Terez is nearly twenty and George is eighteen.”
“But they need a mother’s care, a mother’s love!”
“Nicky needs someone too,” said Malie quietly.
“Will you go, Malie?” He looked straight across the table at her. “I know you are afraid of going away, but who else will look after Nicky?”
“I don’t want to go,” she faltered. “I don’t want to go away again.”
“For Kati. Can’t you do it for Kati?”
He watched her eyes withdraw into some secret world, saw her remembering, and wished he had not been so cruel. They were blurring a little, her memories, not much, but a little, and now he had forced her to look back again. The silence and her staring grew interminable, and then came the noise of Nicky coughing, and for once the sound was welcome.
“I suppose I must go,” she whispered. “He is sick, isn’t he?”
“Yes, Malie.”
“And no one else can go?”
He could have lied to her, but he hoped that enough of the old Malie was there for him to tell the truth. “Eva could go. We all, including Eva, know that she could go.”
“But my children—”
“She could go,” he cut in, “but Eva is not the nurse I would choose for Nicky—not when he has to pass several months alone with her.”
Surprisingly there was no retort from Eva, and he looked to see her sitting red-faced but relieved. A tiny shadow of a smile crossed Malie’s face and a pain moved through his chest. It was the first time Malie had smiled since her return.
“I must do it, then,” she said. “He has no one else.”
The two of them, the weakest of his family, going alone into the country to look after each other. The pain in his chest grew worse.
“When must we go?” she murmured.
“It is still unsettled. Janos Marton will tell us, probably the next time he comes to see Nicky.”
“I think I’ll go and prepare him,” she said, rising suddenly from her chair. “It will be a shock for him. He will not want to leave you all.”
She left the room, a bent, elderly woman with thinning hair, and though the ache in his heart would not disperse he believed that he had given her once more a little pattern to her life.
Janos Marton, their protector, their saviour in the new democratic system of things, gave more than he had promised. The rooms in Matrafured were obtained, and so was a car in which, he stated, he would drive Nicky, Malie, and one other up into the hills. He looked at no one when he asked for a fourth occupant and gave no sign of either pleasure or annoyance when Terez asked if she could go. And on a Sunday morning in early June he drove them up to Matrafured.
At last the country was fertile again; fields of wheat, maize, cabbages and root crops stretched away on every side. The winter was behind and nothing would be quite as bad again. This year the fields had been sown and with the new growth came hope—hope that suddenly communicated itself to the four people in the car.
“Such a lovely day,” Malie murmured. “Like going up to the farm when we were young.”
There was no one there who could remember or understand what she spoke of, but her voice was dreamy, not unhappy, and something of a past life communicated itself to the others.
“We had Uncle Sandor then,” she mused. “Uncle Sandor and... Sultan. That was the name of the horse. And we were so excited when they came to take us up for the summer—so many trunks and boxes, so many dresses. The boys were always afraid of Uncle Sandor. Such a long time ago. Poor old man, he was killed by the revolutionaries in 1919.”
A moment’s discomfort filtered through the car. Janos Marton gave no indication that he had heard and Terez fidgeted in her seat.
“I think you will be comfortable in the house,” Janos said when the moment had passed. “It is outside Matrafured, on the Matrahaza side. There is a lake and a clearing where you can sit and watch the pine trees.”
“I shall like going to the country again.”
Janos put the window of the car down, and the hot smell of the asphalt began to give way to other smells: warm grass, earth, the dry scent of grain.
“I’m sure to get well up in the country,” Nicky enthused from the back seat. “I didn’t think it would be like this. I know I’ll get well again now.”
They all knew that everything would be all right. Nothing could go wrong when the sun was so bright and the ground was fertile once more. Malie suddenly felt that she was going to be contented again one day, that the demented thoughts that raced through her head at night would grow less. She did not feel afraid of summer in the country any more. She knew she could make Nicky well again, knew she could look after him, perhaps—later—earn money enough to send him to college. But before that there was the summer, at peace in the mountains.
And Janos Marton knew that everything would be all right with the Party and with Hungary. His recent fears, the uneasiness that something not quite right was happening, that the Russians would not leave, all vanished into the sun. Little teething problems, soon settled, not to be worried about too long. He was confident today—helping Nicky, his friend, and with the girl in the lace collar by his side. It was summer. He could relax a little; it was summer.
Terez had no worries to evaporate in the country air—at least, no more than those she had lived with since the war began. There was Aunt Malie and Nicky, and worrying about Papa up at the farm, and being irritated with Mama and concerned about money with Uncle Leo. But apart from these ever-present things she had no worries. The thing the Russians had done to her had been pushed away into the darkest part of her mind, pushed so far that she was able to feel young and excited again, excited because she was sitting next to a man whose thin, whipcord body roused a tensing desire in her own. She glanced sideways at him and thought, not for the first time, that if only he would smile he would be handsome. He had removed his coat and his tie, and the open neck of his shirt revealed a tanned skin and smooth throat. His arms reaching out to the wheel of the car were muscular and covered lightly with dark blond hair. The sight was disturbing—both disturbing and exciting. Coming back she would be alone with him. Would he be silent, uncommunicative? Or would the summer thaw his customary icy control?
They came to the house and it was exactly as he had described: a lake, a clearing, and pine trees growing up a knoll that masked the side of the mountain.
“The woman is the widow of a partisan member,” he explained. “He died a hero. Now she makes a living by selling cheese—the Party presented her with a goat as tribute to her late husband—and she also has rooms which the Party use when they wish.” He paused and added in a distant voice, “She is a peasant, a smallholder, Mrs. Klein. You will find her... comfortable to be with.”
He was kind, Terez thought. He didn’t approve of the way they had lived before the war, but he understood that Aunt Malie was too old to absorb new ways. A woman described as a Party member’s widow would only have frightened her. A peasant woman sounded comfortable and familiar.
The rooms were ready and Nicky walked slowly to his bed and climbed in. It faced the open window, and he could see the lake and the pine trees and the mountain behind. He was asleep when they left Terez kissed her aunt good-bye, trying to conceal the mounting excitement in her heart, telling herself that in all probability he wouldn’t even speak to her on the return journey.
Just past Matrafured, on the south side, he stopped the car and climbed out. “We’ve time to walk up a little,” he said, staring over her head. “There used to be a meadow at the end of this track. I shot a pheasant there once.”
He didn’t wait for her answer, just began to climb the track, through rocks and stubby grass. Quickly she followed him. “Don’t you want to lock the car?” she cried. The back of his neck reddened a little and he came back and locked both doors. When he caught up again she let her hand brush against his. They neither of them looked at each other and they spoke as strangers, but their
hands clasped and held fast, the fingers caressing and warm, saying things they could not say with words. They moved on two separate planes, the state of Janos Marton and Terez Kaldy who did not speak, or spoke only coldly, and the being of their hands that longed and stroked and made love. They did not know how to bridge these two planes and make them one, so they were careful not to confuse words with touch in case the one should destroy the other.
The sun beat down on the side of the hill, and they came to a place where three arms of the track faced them. He hesitated a moment and then turned into the most overgrown of these.
“Are you sure this is the right one?”
“Quite sure.”
There were flowers—oh, how long since she had seen wild flowers!—and birds in the undergrowth at the side. They forded a stream and followed its path up the hill into a small wood that filtered out into a ravine.
“Is this where you meant to come?”
“Yes. Up the slope and we are there.”
She had to let go of his hand while she scrambled up the side of the ravine, holding on to the boles of trees, but at the top, as though he were picking up a pen or a book, he took her hand in his again.
“This is the place.” A meadow, quite high, looking out over the hills and distant plains that they had driven through earlier in the day.
They stood, holding hands, not speaking and afraid to move. The moment came when the touch of his hand was not enough for her and she turned to look at him. He was staring out over the plains, his body rigid and controlled, only his hand caressing and moving against hers.
“Janos.” She could wait no longer. Her body demanded the pressure of his; surely he could sense the strain of every muscle, every tendon in her?
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