They Were Found Wanting (Writing on the Wall: The Transylvania Trilogy)

by Bánffy, Miklós

  Carried away by his own enthusiasm Balint spoke warmly and urgently, with colourful phrases that reflected his perennial urge to help others. Even so there was very little applause when he sat down and the next speaker was called upon to rise.

  Balint gathered together his notes and left the Chamber. At the end of the corridor he was met by Timisan.

  ‘My congratulations on your Lordship’s maiden speech!’ he said, holding out his hand. Then, smiling slyly under his grey moustache, he said, ‘Do you remember when you honoured me with your visit? Was I not right? Now you can see for yourself: the Hungarians are too busy with other things to bother with such matters!’

  He turned to go. Then, looking back over his shoulder, as if it were an afterthought, he said, ‘It was kind of you not to have mentioned my name! Thank you!’

  Then the old man stumped heavily back into the Chamber.

  The Spring was so beautiful in the forest that gradually these disagreeable memories faded from Balint’s mind. His footsteps made no sound as he walked slowly over the carpet of fallen leaves now softened by the melting of winter snow. Tiny bell-like flowers glistened on the red-brown loam that lay below the giant beeches whose pale grey trunks towered high above him. In the clearings between the trees cornelian-coloured cherries were in bloom and the hazel bushes were tasselled with catkins. Orange-red ‘Bleeding Hearts’ glowed beneath the white stars of blackthorn and here and there wild cherries were festooned with cream-coloured bouquets. Looking up through the lacy green trembling foliage of the trees one could see that the sky, though flecked with a few barely moving clouds, was still brilliantly blue; down below the shadows of dusk were just beginning to blur the outlines of the magic forest, giving it a dreamlike quality of unreality.

  In the trees the evening calls of those day birds who would break into full chorus at dawn were dying away, to be interrupted by the first tentative notes of a nightingale whose broken roulades seemed to suggest that he was only waiting for darkness to fall before breaking into full song.

  Balint’s path took him slightly uphill to the eastern edge of the forest. Already he could glimpse the line of the ridge that marked the boundary and in a few moments, without planning or even consciously thinking where he was going, he found himself standing on the summit. It was as if his feet alone, automatically, instinctively, had carried him to just that place from which he could see, across the valley, an open clearing sloping towards him.

  Here he stopped.

  He looked across to the hills opposite which were covered with oak saplings, clad in pale green and standing in fields of lush grass. Above them there was a wall of tall young trees. To his left the valley twisted sharply away so that the vista was closed by a ring of small hills whose tree-covered crests concealed the world beyond. Everything was green, green of all shades, sprinkled with the cool freshness of young shoots, some so pale as to be almost yellow, nature’s renewal triumphant.

  Balint looked around. He was at the place where the Uzdy forest began.

  It seemed to him that he had come to the very spot where he had stood a year and a half before. And yet perhaps it was not quite there but a little further up, for there near the path was the giant beech tree at whose foot he had stood, one morning last November, waiting for Adrienne. It was from there that he had seen her, crossing the ridge opposite and emerging from the trees by the bend in the valley, hurrying towards him with her long even strides.

  She had worn a grey homespun dress. He remembered it well.

  Even now it seemed to him that he could see her. Then everything had been golden-bronze in colour, purple and flame; now it was all emerald green. Yes, surely it was there, just a little way away where the huge tree’s forking branches towered above the shrubs beneath, that he had waited so anxiously on that autumn morning when they were to say goodbye for ever. And how much had happened since!

  Spontaneously he started to walk towards the tree, still without thinking, as one does when going to meet a friend at a familiar rendezvous.

  To reach the great beech he had to get round the trunk of a tree felled by the wind which lay across the path, and to do so he was forced to fight his way through thick undergrowth, breaking off shoots as he went. By the time Balint emerged once more onto the path it was getting dark. He stood there, alone. Before him, barely twenty paces distant, was the old tree, its vast trunk like a tower, its spreading roots covered with velvet moss.

  And between the roots, leaning against the tree, was a woman, her grey dress melting into the dove-grey of the bark. Only the pale oval of her face, framed by the dark aureole of her hair, stood out against the shadowy background. She stood quite still, her amber eyes gazing straight into his, wide open as if she were seeing a vision.

  It was she, Adrienne! And she stood there, melting into the tree, just as if she knew he was coming and was waiting for him.

  As a gust of wind will seize a leaf and make it fly so the young man stormed forward. In a second he stood before her and in another they were in each others’ arms.

  Thirsty lips searched for thirsty lips, their arms held their bodies in tight embrace while their hands grabbed and tore at each other’s flesh all the more fiercely for after many months of enforced separation and suppressed longings they were both overcome by a storm of desire, an elemental force that neither could withstand. For Balint and Adrienne it was like an earthquake or typhoon, a destroying power which no words could express, sublime and irresistible, annihilating everything in the world but their need for each other. The only words they could find were each other’s names, endlessly repeated and half swallowed by the eagerness and desperation of their kisses as they pulled themselves to the ground and sank tightly entwined into the deep carpet of moss and leaves, abandoning themselves to their mutual passion …

  In the twilight sky above a few bats flew ever upwards barely visible between the forest and the deep violet of the heavens.

  At length Adrienne sat up and raised her hands to tidy her tousled hair.

  Balint looked up at her, hesitant and worried. After the joy and daze of their unexpected meeting had subsided he was suddenly assailed by terrible misgivings, remembering Addy’s baleful words in Venice nearly a year before when they had parted at dawn and when she had said, ‘I will try to go on living … provided we never meet again.’

  That had been their agreement, and he had accepted it to save her from the despairing self-inflicted death she had determined upon if ever their love were consummated and to which he had again agreed after they had become lovers and then been forced to part. The threat of death had long been with them, not only her own freely chosen suicide but also from outside, from Adrienne’s husband, Pal Uzdy, the mad son of a mad father, who, burdened by his own baleful heredity, always carried a loaded revolver and delighted in the fear he inspired. During Balint’s long pursuit of Adrienne he had paid little heed to the menace of Pal Uzdy’s unstable temperament, but it had haunted them both when, a year before, Adrienne had travelled to Venice with her sisters.

  It was then that, at long last, Adrienne had summoned Balint to join her. It was just to be for four weeks, no more, just four weeks of joy and the fulfilment of their dreams, four weeks of paradise for which she had decreed she would pay with her life. At the time it had not seemed too high a price to pay.

  On their first night together they had been on the point of drawing back but, overcome by their love, they had been carried away until no withdrawal was possible. At the end of their brief month it was only fear for what might happen to Balint that made Adrienne’s determination falter.

  Long before they finally had come together they had been haunted by the Angel of Death when Adrienne, at last conscious of her love for Balint, had written to him imploring him to go away rather than make her surrender to his passion, saying, ‘… if that would happen I would kill myself … I am his wife, his chattel. How could I live … if with him and with you too? I would rather die. There is no other way!’
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  What happened later, until their sad parting in Venice, was now only a memory, but the words of Adrienne’s letter had remained with him as an ever-present threat. What would now happen? What could now happen? To part again was to him unthinkable, nothing would make him leave her again; but his heart missed a beat at the thought that this unplanned meeting might not have released Adrienne from her promise and that, as before, she would never accept a double existence with her husband and with him.

  From where he lay he could not properly see her face. He sat up, his hand on Adrienne’s knee. He said only one word, but in it was framed the only question to which he needed an answer. ‘Addy?’ he said.

  She looked at him smiling faintly with her mouth and more frankly with her eyes. She gave him her hand, her long supple fingers gently caressing his own.

  ‘I don’t mind anything any more … not now,’ she said slowly.

  Adrienne had also been thinking back to their parting in Venice and to what she had then said.

  When, after Balint had left her and she had stood at the window gazing sightlessly over the great lagoon, she had felt that she had already died, that her life was over, and that in promising her lover that she would not now take her own life she had merely done so to comfort him. In reality she had decided that she would do nothing for some weeks, or even months, so that no one would make any connection between her death and the man in whose arms she, for the first and only time in her life, had been made happy.

  Afterwards she had not changed her intention.

  When her husband arrived in Venice she had greeted him with as much interest as if she were walking in her sleep. She had been kept busy with arranging the details of their return and above all with caring for her sick younger sister, Judith.

  It was concern for Judith which had kept Adrienne sane in the first days after Balint had gone away. Poor Judith! What a sad fate hers had been! The trip to Venice had been arranged by the family to give the girl a change of air and to take her far away from the place where she had been shocked into mental withdrawal when her lover was proved a villain and ran away without giving her a thought. Maybe, the family had hoped, the change would help bring her to her senses.

  As it had turned out Judith had already been nearer to a complete breakdown than anyone had realized; and the final blow that thrust her over the edge had come in Venice, at the Lido, when her own love-letters were sent back to her by an unknown woman in whose house Judith’s lover had left them. Until then Judith had not realized the full extent of the betrayal, thinking her lover as much sinned against as sinning, and the shock of this new knowledge had completely unhinged her. Her mind, already disturbed, had then become so totally withdrawn that she was hardly conscious of her surroundings and had to be tended, with great gentleness, as if she were a backward child.

  Afterwards there had been the trip to Vienna to consult nerve specialists and also to visit the sanatorium where her mother had been for some time. And when they had returned at last to her father’s home at Mezo-Varjas Adrienne had found that it was she who had to take charge of everything, for her father, though full of goodwill, was capable of little more than shouting at the servants and creating confusion wherever he went. The responsibilities had helped Adrienne to get through the first five weeks after Balint had had to leave her.

  All this time Adrienne had lived only for other people and it had seemed to her that her own life did not exist, that she had become a mere abstraction, a will, whose only function was to keep her family from breaking up.

  With these burdens upon her shoulders Adrienne had spent almost all her time at her father’s house where she had found herself obliged to manage everything. It was to her that the estate manager came for all decisions, discreetly and without letting Count Miloth see that he was doing so; and it was Adrienne who had seen to it that the heavy cost of her mother’s stay in the Austrian sanatorium was paid promptly and in full.

  As for Judith, it had been obvious that she could no longer continue to share a room with her younger sister, Margit. Accordingly Adrienne had decided she would be better off isolated at the far end of one of the wings of the old one-storey manor-house where she would not be disturbed by the noise of her father shouting at the servants.

  Adrienne had chosen two unused rooms, furnished them, and installed Judith in one while in the other she placed a kindly old serving woman who had lived at Varjas all her life and who had known Judith since she had been a child.

  One day Adrienne had noticed that the sight of some small domestic animals had awakened some sign of interest in Judith’s muddled brain and she had, accordingly, arranged for her a little domestic poultry yard at the corner of the house with a few hens and some rabbits. This had been a great success. Judith had seemed overjoyed when she was first shown this new toy and ever since she had spent much of her time here, feeding and tending her new pets.

  All this at last made Adrienne more independent of the authority of her mother-in-law and of her husband. This was a duty, and before such a duty her husband and his mother had had to yield. Furthermore it had provided a wonderful excuse to escape frequently from her husband’s house, Almasko, where Adrienne had had nothing to do and where it was as if she were a guest in her own home. There it was the old countess who ran the household and supervised the upbringing of Adrienne’s little daughter – and in both she brooked no interference from Adrienne. For the rest, Pal Uzdy did everything, himself attending to the smallest details of the running of the estate and the forests. Adrienne had tried to interest herself in the gardens and orchards but it had soon become obvious that the others despised her for it, tolerating such activity with condescending smiles as if it were a mere pastime, the futile and meaningless games of a child.

  But now everything was different, for Adrienne’s family responsibilities were real. Until now Pal Uzdy had always treated his wife as if she were some sort of bought slave who had no other function in his house but to look beautiful, act obediently, and be there whenever he desired her. Now it was as if some new recognition had dawned in Uzdy, as if, however dimly, he had become aware that she might just be human – and it even appeared, in some strange way, as if he took pride in her being of use to her family.

  This, however, was only upon the surface, for their marital relations remained the same as before. Adrienne still felt only fear and disgust when Uzdy came to her bedroom, and, with the blissful memory of her nights in Venice with Balint, she felt that she had stepped back from heaven into hell, a hell to which she had sentenced herself.

  As the weeks – and then months – had gone by Adrienne thought more and more of what she had denied herself when she had banished Balint from her life. As she did so it had seemed that the arguments by which she had convinced herself she was doing right had dimmed into pale insignificance.

  Whatever she did she was haunted by the memories of those weeks of joy and happiness, and hardly a day passed without her mentally reliving the love they had known together.

  At Mezo-Varjas she would return again and again to the garden bench where Balint had first told her of his love and where she had been angry and offended by his passionate words of love and by the kiss he had implanted on her arm. How childish all that seemed now!

  In her rooms at the Uzdy villa at Kolozsvar, where Adrienne often spent the night on her way to her father’s house, there were memories in every corner. There everything was the same as it had always been: the deep-piled white carpets in her sitting-room, strewn with soft cushions where, in front of the fire, Balint and she had lain so often in an embrace as chaste as if they had been brother and sister. How many times they had been there together in the first days of their love! It was there that Balint had first taught her to kiss and where he had once, on a dark evening as dusk was falling, tried to take her by force. How she had rebelled! It was in the same room, much later, when she had just started to become aware of all that true love entailed, that she had written him that terrible let
ter, the letter that was to have put an end to their friendship, in which she had explained that she did not want to become his mistress, that she could never ever become his mistress for ‘if that were to happen’ she felt she would have to kill herself …

  It was there, in June the year before, that it had been decided with her father and younger sister Margit that they should go to Venice and where, when she had obtained the necessary agreement from her husband and mother-in-law, that she had first known, even though she hardly admitted it to herself, that she had taken the great decision to ask Balint to join her believing that she would never return alive.

  In those days her desire had been stronger than anything she had previously known.

  Even at Almasko it had been the same. Here, too, everything reminded her of her love for Balint: in her bedroom, when she had been ill and Uzdy had left the house at dawn, Balint had come to see her; in the forests where they had walked their arms enlaced; and, above all, here under the great beech which had been the only witness of their secret meeting.

  Adrienne had come here often since her return from Venice. And almost every day she had stood there, alone and forlorn.

  Tormented by her memories, there arose in her one over-riding desire – to see Balint again. During the long, long months of separation she had been assailed by all sorts of conflicting emotions, emotions that seemed to have only one thing in common and that was that they all led to one conclusion: nothing that she had previously thought sacred and unchangeable was valid any more.

  Adrienne had had little news of Balint. Occasionally she had heard that he had been in Budapest, or at Denestornya with his mother; but these had been mere geographical facts – of his life she had heard nothing. She longed to know what he was doing and above all what he was feeling. Did he still remember her or had he already found some other woman with whom he could console himself? When this thought came to her the pain of jealousy was so sharp that she nearly cried out in despair.