As it happened, when he announced that he would be leaving in a couple of days, relations with his mother improved at once. Countess Abady enquired tenderly when he would be back and then, as though to underline that peace had been re-established between them – though without any sign of her yielding – she started to talk about Balint’s management of the forest properties.
‘I really am very pleased with all the reforms you’ve put in hand in the mountains,’ she said. ‘You’ve obviously got a thorough grasp of it all now. I’d like you to start managing our lowland forests too. You know, the oak and beech woods near Hunyad. You can take full charge. No need to consult me except when there’s something really important to decide.’
Balint took her hand and kissed it.
Countess Abady went on, ‘Old Nyiresy is really no use any more as forest superintendent.’ She paused. ‘You see I do know who is useful and worthy of our trust. I’ll let the other know …’ thus avoiding mentioning Azbej by name, ‘… that you are the master there. But do tell me when you’ll be coming back?’
‘Unfortunately I can’t be sure; but I feel I should stay as long as the education debate goes on. I might even speak. But as soon as that’s over I’ll come back at once.’
‘That’s good. That’s very good!’ murmured Countess Roza, and as a token of peace she rather distantly stroked her son’s face.
Though the two housekeepers for once had not been present when this conversation took place, they had spent so many years by her side that from half-expressed references dropped by their mistress they soon were aware of what had been decided. No time was lost in passing on to their old ally, Azbej, that he should now practise a little caution.
Consequently it was the very next day that Azbej came posthaste to Kolozsvar. He was clever enough to realize that though the countess had backed him up in the matter of the Kozard leases it would be just as well, if one was wise, not to forget that he still had to reckon with Count Balint. It was important, therefore, in some way to humour him in this latest dispute, because – who knows? – one day it might come about that the countess sided with her son. It would be prudent to make some concessions in the Gyeroffy affair, and so he begged Balint for an audience.
Azbej’s manner was even more humble than it had been before. He told Balint that he had made a full check, re-thought the whole situation and made some provisional plans to so force production that the estate would yield more. Also by re-estimating the value of the equipment he found that he would be able to increase the rent by 2,400 crowns each year. He said that he had made his wife accept this extra charge …
Abady interrupted him, asking ironically, ‘And your brother-in-law? Did he agree too?’
Azbej smiled, not in the least disconcerted. He knew well that he had never mentioned any brother-in-law to Balint, and indeed that he had merely invented a brother-in-law’s participation for the benefit of the old countess because he thought it sounded better. Such inconsistencies never bothered Azbej, so he merely skated over this obvious crack in his story by blinking and saying, ‘Of course! Naturally! With him too; though, as he had never paid my wife’s dowry in full, all he had to do was to sign a draft.’
He went on talking volubly, bowing whenever he could and swearing that his only desire was to remain in his Lordship’s good graces; and all the time he kept a fixed smile on his little red mouth to conceal from the noble Count how much it hurt that some of the fat profit he had planned for himself was now to be plucked from him.
Well, thought Balint, it’s just as well that I did intervene. My mother may still be annoyed but in time she’ll forget about it. When Azbej took his leave Balint sat down and wrote a few words to Dodo telling her what he had achieved, thinking that if she was so concerned for Laszlo she would be made happy by his news.
Later that afternoon he heard that the Miloth family had returned and that Countess Miloth would be buried on the following day.
He left for the capital that evening.
Chapter Four
IT WAS THE BEGINNING of May and Spring was at its most beautiful. There was not a cloud in the clear blue sky which covered the whole mountainous landscape like an azure dome.
Far away to the south, behind the bare peaks of the Korosfo mountains, there started a dark wavy line high up in the sky, which marked the highest and furthest ranges. This continued to the south-west past the triple summits of the Vlegyasa and the steep crags of the mountains closing the gorge of Sebesvar, crags that were crowned by thick forests of oak, until, in the west and north-west, it merged with the towering Meszes range which, stretching far into the distance, ridge after ridge, descended gradually into the bluish vapour above the river Almas. Then to the north, there appeared the bare clay slopes and leafy beech forests of the Gorbo country. Finally the circle was closed to the east by the strange mushroom-like cone of the Reszeg – or Drunken – mountain. All around the horizon there was a pale shimmering almost grey radiance which became more deeply blue as it rose into the clear azure of a sky so clear, so immense, so virginal that it was as if it had never known the sign of a storm cloud. In the silence and stillness the earth seemed to vibrate slightly as if the whole world were throbbing with the expectation and desire for the great re-birth of Spring.
On the wide plateau at the heart of this panorama, whence rose the springs which on the one side fed the Almas river and on the other the Koros, in the centre of a gently sloping little circular meadow shaded by the low hanging branches of the surrounding trees, stood Balint Abady. With him were Geza Winckler, his newly-engaged forest manager, and, a little way off, the estate forester ‘Honey’ Andras Zutor and a small group of other men who carried red-and-white painted poles, compasses, measuring tapes and a set of binoculars on a tripod – all the tools of forest-planning.
Winckler, a highly qualified forester, was explaining his plans. Firstly, he said, he had made himself familiar with the Abady holdings by himself walking all over them. Now, he suggested, the plantations should be laid out on each side of a main drive which, starting from where they stood, would run from one end of the property to the other right to where, just east of Count Uzdy’s holdings, the Abady forests marched with municipal lands. On each side, north and east, smaller drives would separate each stand of timber into 50-acre plots. All this he explained to Abady, showing him detailed maps that he had drawn up himself. One problem remained to be decided: should they now let each plot follow the contours of the valleys on the side of the plateau until they ended naturally on the crests of the surrounding hills, or should they disregard the lie of the land and plan the separate plots on a strictly geometric basis which, of course, had certain administrative advantages but which would entail reckoning with different soil conditions. The first proposition was more complicated to administer but, from the point of view of husbandry, might well prove the more profitable.
Abady was trying hard to pay attention to what the manager was saying. It was important to him, as the whole future profitability of the holding depended on what was now being decided and so he made every effort, mentally, to take in what was being suggested. His mind was with it. His eyes were not.
Abady’s eyes did not see the maps. They looked elsewhere, into the distance, where, far away through a gap between the young foliage of two great oaks, just visible behind a lacy curtain of pale green leaves, could be seen two vertical lines, the colour of newly churned butter, which shone in the early morning sunlight. They were the two remaining walls of the donjon of the ruined fortress of Almasko. From where he stood these two distant lines were only tiny strips but one felt that they must in reality be very high indeed, standing like two exclamation marks reaching into the sky demanding attention. At their feet lay the forests, wave after wave, until at length they ended at the two oak trees between which the ruins could be glimpsed. It was like a window, just large enough for the two massive walls to shine through from the far horizon, from the distant past …
Balint m
oved his position: one single step and the forest closed up, the ruins disappearing. Now his whole attention was given to the forest manager.
By the late afternoon they had walked to all the more important parts of the forest, returning at last to the sloping meadow from which they had set out. Here Abady’s tent had been erected as, although the meadow was by no means at the heart of the property but was close to the eastern border only a few hundred metres from the Uzdy forests, it had an excellent water supply which was always important to the people of the Kalotaszeg.
The sun had already disappeared below the Kiralyhago – the King’s Pass – but, high above, the light clouds which had started to gather during the afternoon, shone brightly in the distant sunshine.
The foresters were busily occupied in bringing wood and building a fire and preparing their beds. Winckler was writing up his notes.
Balint set off to walk in the forest, following a narrow deer track.
Now that at last he was on his own Balint walked slowly, and his thoughts returned to the time he had just spent in Budapest and to the violent debates in Parliament which had arisen only a few days before.
Discussion had raged about Apponyi’s proposals for a new schools law which, while bringing substantial financial help to the minority schools (and incidentally adding a heavy load to the State budget), would at the same time have exacted an even more intensive instruction in the Hungarian language and increased State control of the teaching profession. The motion represented a radical change, especially for the ecclesiastical schools, because it gave the State school inspectors the authority to suspend teachers if their teaching of Hungarian was felt to be inadequate. Previously such sanctions had been the privilege of the church authorities alone.
From the start Apponyi broke with tradition because in the past any motion that affected the powers of the clergy would have been preceded by discussions with the church authorities and would have then been presented with their tacit, if not open, consent. Apponyi ignored this procedure, relying directly upon the legal obligations concerning the ethnic minorities.
At the beginning of March the minority members declared that they would revert to that policy of obstruction which formerly had been the favourite tool of the present government when it had been in opposition. At this moment the heads of the Romanian church handed in a protest memorandum demanding that Apponyi should pass it on to the King. This last action made it clear that discussions on Apponyi’s motion would lead to the reopening of the Romanian question since, of the 25-strong minorities group in Parliament, only three were not Romanians.
On April 4th, Polit, the leader of the minorities group, had presented his own deposition and he was followed only by Romanian members who all made lengthy speeches. This policy had been decided upon as their numbers were insufficient to insist upon endless vote-taking, the classic method of stopping or delaying parliamentary business. Instead they embarked on a policy of talking out the debates with speeches lasting several hours, speeches which often consisted largely of reading out lengthy extracts from previous debates and pleadings, until the rest of the House, the majority, was dying of ennui.
There had been the occasional lively moment when some government member would shout out some colourful phrase or slogan – as they had in the past, when in opposition, inveighing against that ‘cursed Vienna’ – though now their invective was directed at the cursed minorities. Discussion raged one day when government members read in their newspapers that during the previous day’s debate the Romanian Vaida had read out a poem defamatory of Hungarians which no one, not even the shorthand recorders, had even noticed, so general had been the boredom.
The debate was not really taken seriously until one day Istvan Bethlen made his first speech. Until then, though everyone knew that Bethlen was one of the leading figures in Apponyi’s section of the Independence Party, he had worked almost exclusively in committees. When it was known that he was to speak the House suddenly began to fill up until not a seat was empty. They were rewarded by a most powerful intervention, hard-hitting and aggressive, which instantly transformed the farce of the previous proceedings into a serious battle on more fundamental issues than had until then been discussed.
Bethlen, ignoring the petty matters of school laws, went straight to the heart of the whole problem of the large Romanian minorities who, of course, actually formed a majority of the population in the province of Transylvania. This had the shock effect of bringing out into the open what everyone had until then refused to discuss. At once there were accusations of chauvinism, of disloyal contacts in Bucharest, and hotly contested statements about the increasing power and influence of the minorities. From that moment on the Romanian members found themselves on the defensive.
Abady had now felt that the time had come for him to speak up too. He had realized that he might not be able to say anything that was new, interesting, or previously unknown but he had felt nevertheless that he should now rise and say what he thought. Accordingly he had set to work to prepare himself and when he had gathered his material together he sent in his name as a speaker in the debate.
When Balint rose the House was half empty, probably because he was unknown and owed allegiance to no party. This last was important because each party always ensured that there was an audience for its own members, who would be encouraged with applause and loudly vocal support. But a member who belonged to no party, who had no declared policies, was heard only by those few enthusiasts who would listen to anything and everything, and, of course, by the Ministers whose motions were the subject of debate.
And so it turned out that while Abady was speaking there had only been a bare ten or fifteen of the majority party members present in the Chamber. Only the minority listened carefully to what he had to say; and sitting at the end of the minority bench was the lawyer, Aurel Timisan, who had been one of the defendants in the Memorandum Trial.
Balint spoke about the carefully planned and politically motivated policy of agricultural loans which the Romanian-owned banks, under the leadership of the Union Bank, pursued among the peasants in the central plain and mountains of Transylvania. Certain persons in the confidence of the bank would receive cheap loans and they, in turn, would lend this to the Romanian peasantry through intermediaries. With each transaction the loan would get more and more expensive until the peasant borrowers would find themselves paying staggeringly high usury rates.
‘I know cases,’ he said, ‘where the original twenty-five or thirty per cent has risen to two or three hundred per cent. Of course no debtor can cope with such sums. When compound interest is added to the loan the debt soon exceeds the borrower’s assets and he is forced to go bankrupt. The bailiffs are sent in, the lenders foreclose and the land passes into the hands of those “men of confidence”. The peasant proprietor is ruined and the best he can hope for is to become a tied worker on what used to be his own land. There are thus two major effects: human rights are violated and political resentment is fostered. And who are these “men of confidence”? They are the Hungarian notary, the Hungarian bailiff, and the Hungarian judge. All the poor Romanian peasant can grasp is that the very men who should be his protectors against injustice are the same men who enforce that injustice! Can anyone wonder that he considers these men as much his enemies as their intermediaries who have furnished these monstrous loans? Can anyone wonder at the sense of injustice felt by the hard-pressed borrower and the dispossessed small farmer when at the mercy of the very men whose authority they are forced to accept? This state of things is endemic in the poorer regions. It is a carefully planned operation which is swiftly moving our under-privileged minorities into dependency while at the same time building up rich and powerful estates who owe their existence to Romania.’
The House listened in bored indifference until Balint had felt that everything he was saying was futile and devoid of interest or significance. He also had an uneasy feeling that he was not presenting his case sufficiently well, that his voic
e was monotonous, his manner dull. Only the Romanian members paid any attention and they, shrugging their shoulders at everything he said, showed clearly that they did not believe a word of it, that it was all untrue and the product of an overworked imagination.
Of all his hearers, only old Timisan gave the impression of really listening to what Balint said. He leant forward, one hand cupped to an ear, clearly intent on not missing a word. Under his bushy white eyebrows his watching eyes were full of suspicion as he took in every sentence. He was waiting to see if Balint would mention his name.
The reason for this was that Timisan had been the man from whom Balint had learned all about the Romanian bank’s carefully laid plans, about the systematic policy they had been employing. This had been when Balint, a year and a half before, had gone to seek his advice when he had found out how some of the former Abady dependants were being ruined in this way.
Balint never referred to Timisan by name. To do so would have caused a sensation but he refrained, speaking only in general terms and not revealing his sources.
When Balint had finished explaining the situation and had begun to suggest ways of putting matters right Timisan’s obvious interest vanished. Now Balint proposed co-operative societies as an antidote to the individual peasant’s dependence on bank loans. He said that such co-operatives should group together people of the same region regardless of race or religion, that smaller centres should be established where the population was sparser, that teachers and trained accounting clerks should be posted to country districts and that bigger credits, at lower interest rates, should be available to the communities. He also proposed that free legal aid should be given to those who were already entangled in the money-lenders’ clutches.
They Were Found Wanting (Writing on the Wall: The Transylvania Trilogy) Page 6