A World to Win

by Mary Lancaster

  They laughed their derision in hoots and howls. I hadn’t really expected anything else — I have never been a commanding figure — but I had never felt so helpless as I did now, watching the ugly man throw book after book through the window, each time trying to choose a part of the pane which was not already shattered. His friend, a youngish man with blond whiskers, improved on this by throwing books at Aaron Klein. One hit him in the chest, another caught him on the side of his forehead, making him stagger.

  “Stop it!” I cried desperately, standing in front of the old man, though he tried to push me away. I saw the cruel smile die on the burly man’s face. With one hand he reached out and plucked me aside. With the other, he quite casually hit Aaron Klein in the face. The old man went crashing backwards under the dreadful force, falling heavily into the table behind him. I saw the agony on his face as it dug into him.

  The other men advanced as my captor dragged me out of the way, saying sneeringly, “So, a little Jew-lover, eh? Can’t you do any better than that old fool? You’re not so bad-looking without these things.” And he wrenched off my spectacles, tossing them carelessly over his shoulder.

  Now my unaccustomed blindness added to the terror of the situation, but I didn’t need my spectacles to see the other men repeatedly punching Aaron Klein. For a moment I felt utter despair at man’s inhumanity; but then sheer anger as well as fear lent me strength. Viciously, I kicked my captor in the shins, tearing free and launching myself on the old man’s attackers, screaming, “Leave him! Leave him alone, you’ll kill him! For God’s sake, leave him alone!”

  But of course, they didn’t leave him. I was flung back into the arms of the burly man, just as I heard the sound of the shop door opening, pushing against broken glass and fallen books.

  “Had enough, Jew?” the blond-whiskered man was jeering breathlessly.

  I found I had closed my eyes in prayer. Please, God, let whoever has come in be a good man. Let him fetch the soldiers, and oh please God, quickly...

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  A voice of searing-white anger cracked through the commotion like a gunshot.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Release these people now!”

  Open-mouthed, the men dropped Aaron Klein. My own captor’s hold grew slack as they all turned to stare at the newcomer. That one man should stay to speak so to these brutes was wonderful enough, but it was the voice itself which paralysed me. Unaccustomedly harsh as it was, it undoubtedly belonged to Lajos Lázár.

  Through my myopic haze, I saw him stride the length of the shop towards me.

  “I said, release her!”

  The burly man obeyed, pushing me aside, but only to square up sneeringly to Lajos who was, after all, the smaller and lighter man.

  “Why should I?” he jeered.

  For answer, Lajos swung back his arm with extraordinary speed, and quite unexpectedly crashed his fist full into the burly man’s face. He fell like a stone. I remember being amazed, for I had never seen Lajos use physical violence against anyone. I remember too the fierce, almost frightening satisfaction it gave me to see his victim go down. In a flash, Lajos had his foot on the man’s neck.

  “That,” he said gently, “is why.”

  “Lajos,” I said hoarsely, for the others were advancing behind him. This was worse than anything...

  Almost casually, he glanced over his shoulder. “Come a step nearer and I’ll break his useless neck.”

  The thin, ugly man uttered a vicious obscenity and kept coming, but to my surprise, the blond-whiskered man held him back, saying uneasily, “No wait, don’t you know him?”

  But he was shaken off. “I don’t care if he’s Kossuth himself.”

  “He’s Lázár! Lajos Lázár!!”

  There was a pause. I could hear it. Something intangible had snapped.

  Lajos took his foot off the burly man’s neck. I moved and knelt, trembling now, beside Aaron Klein’s fallen, bleeding body.

  “Is he badly hurt?” Lajos asked, his voice still clipped and watchful.

  In fact, I thought that the old man was dead, but to my unspeakable relief, his lips stretched into a smile. His eyes opened. “I’m fine,” he said shakily, with a patent lack of truth, but it reassured both Lajos and me. I helped him to sit up, and then began to search blindly for my spectacles.

  By now, the burly man was back on his feet, shaking his head like a dog, as if to clear his fuddled wits. He stared at Lajos, fists clenched. With clumsy hands, I pushed my recovered glasses on to my nose. Lajos, I saw clearly now, was staring back with utter, withering contempt.

  “No. I don’t think so,” he said scornfully. “Your friends won’t back you now, for I’m not a defenceless old man, or a girl. I’ll fight you if you like, but I warn you, I know more dirty tricks than you ever will.”

  He had needed to, I thought irrelevantly, to hold his own against the older boys in the village and against István and his aristocratic friends...

  “Who is this little turd?” the burly man demanded, but his bravado was forced now, I saw, and desperate, designed only to get the others back on his side.

  “Didn’t you hear?” said the blond man impatiently. “It’s Lázár.”

  “At your service,” Lajos said ironically. “And what do you men imagine you are doing here?”

  Weirdly, the situation had completely reversed. Lajos was in charge, now. The five brutes were at his mercy, preparing to answer to their better. Lajos let his eye wander round the wrecked shop, the broken glass, the carnage, coming to rest at last on Aaron Klein’s battered figure.

  “He’s a Jew!” said the ugly man by way of an excuse.

  “I know. So what? This lady is Scottish. I happen to be a Magyar. You, if I don’t mistake, are German by origin. What is that to say to anything?”

  “You should understand!” said the burly man, blustering. “It’s for Hungary! We’re ridding the Fatherland of foreign oppression!”

  I thought Lajos whitened at this, but without pause he lashed back, “Rubbish! You’re stirring up hatred of the Jews to justify your own petty, cowardly desire for violence! Don’t you dare pretend this is for Hungary, for the revolution! What is remotely great or glorious about five grown men beating up a solitary old man and a girl?”

  I think it was his presence — the same presence which had spellbound thousands — rather than the words themselves which had the effect. But the men actually began to look almost sheepish. They shifted from one foot to another like monstrous, naughty schoolboys, and started to mutter.

  “Exactly,” said Lajos contemptuously. “Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s pathetic, paltry, cruel, a crime against humanity and against the revolution itself. Do you really think we risked our necks on the fifteenth of March, and every day since, so that you can choose to beat old men whenever the fancy takes you? No, that’s not what we meant by liberty.”

  He pushed casually past the burly man and rested his hips against the table as he looked from one man to the next. He even put his hands in his pockets. But though he appeared so much at his ease, I could sense the desperate tension in him — after all, I knew him very well.

  “Before you leave,” he said conversationally, “let me also give you a short lesson in equality — the second principle of the revolution. Equality means that Aaron Klein is no better and no worse than you — at least when you were all born. But now, your action has placed him immeasurably above you — not because he is better now than before but because you have sunk to depths lower than animals.”

  That penetrated. Trembling uncontrollably now, I was terrified that he had gone too far. The ugly man certainly took a hasty step nearer him, but Lajos held him back with one look.

  “I haven’t finished. I hope you feel proud, gentlemen, because you have spilled the first blood, brought the first shame on the revolution, and that is how you will be preserved in the history books. Hungarian children will revile you. I certainly do. Now, get out — I hope the soldiers c
atch you.”

  He was so completely in command that despite his deliberate insults — or perhaps because of them — the brutes could not even meet his gaze as slowly, silently, they shuffled out of the wreckage of the shop. Like the whipped curs they were, I thought with loathing.

  I sat back on my heels, resting my head on my arm from sheer relief. Vaguely, I was aware of Lajos moving towards us. As I lifted my head again, he dropped to one knee on the other side of Aaron Klein, gripping the old man’s shoulder with one strong hand. But oddly enough, it was at me he was looking, for the first time since he had entered the shop. The tension in him was still taut as a bow, his eyes heavily veiled, almost opaque.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked quietly.

  I shook my head. “No,” I said unsteadily. “I’m just in a fiendish quake.”

  “Not you!” the old man said with surprising strength. “Brave as a lioness, Lajos!”

  “I know.” His gaze fell to the bookseller. “And you, sir? How bad are you?”

  Despite everything he had just done, he still gave the natural respect of youth to age. Of course, they seemed to know each other... Somewhere beneath my daze, I was surprised to see that his hand, resting on the old man’s shoulder, was shaking. Its knuckles were cut, sluggishly bleeding.

  Aaron Klein shrugged and winced. “As you see, I have a bloody nose and a few cuts and bruises. I have a sore back and a pain in my chest. And I fear I may be sick if my stomach doesn’t stop hurting soon.”

  Lajos looked around him. “There’s nothing here... come, I’ll take you to my place and you can clean up and rest.”

  “I can’t leave the shop — not like this!”

  Lajos blinked. “Why the devil not? Do you imagine you’ll get customers?”

  The old man choked on a laugh, and winced painfully. “Drat you, boy, don’t do that.”

  Lajos’s hand almost clenched on the thin shoulder. “Christ, Aaron, I’m sorry...”

  “For what? You probably saved my life and what’s left of my shop.”

  “Sorry that anything I ever said might have led them to believe that they could do this.”

  “Forget it,” Aaron Klein said kindly. “It happens. Governments, revolutions, come and go, but persecution of my race is eternal! Still, it must be said in favour of my people — and yours — that we are still here.”

  “Then I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner...”

  “I don’t know what fate brought you here at all.”

  “Neither do I, but he had a nervous tick. Can you stand?”

  “I expect so...”

  I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation, for my breath had caught on unexpected laughter and then, quite suddenly, the subdued emotion of weeks erupted inside me, not with violence or hate, but with clear, devastating self-knowledge.

  Stricken by the truth, that I couldn’t turn love into hate simply by manufacturing disapproval, I turned away from them, stumbling blindly through the carnage towards the door. Of course I loved him. I would always love him, because anything else was impossible for me now. But it was equally true that while he may not have been the villain my fever of hurt had tried to make him, he still did not love me. Otherwise, he could not have made the sort of proposal he had. Oh, he cared; I knew that now, and before the fifteenth of March that might have been enough for me. But for two whole days I had dreamed of being everything to him, and now nothing less would do. I could not stand beside Teréz and his other women, past, present and future. I could not bear his casual, priestless, temporary ‘marriage’.

  Behind me, I heard his voice speak my name, but I would not stop. I fled, oblivious to the mobs which could still be rampaging through these streets, and quite careless of the appearance I must have presented, running away from Aaron Klein’s shop with the tears pouring down my cheeks.

  * * * *

  It was shortly after this that Baron Acsády appeared in the capital. It must be said that the news was not greeted with undiluted pleasure. Katalin’s nose wrinkled with distaste, and Elisabeth’s eyes positively flashed with venom — aimed, I was sure, at the sister whom she suspected, on no grounds that I ever discovered, of having designs upon her husband.

  “I wonder what brings them here?” István said thoughtfully. Katalin looked at him.

  “I thought you had,” she admitted. “I was all set to tell you that nothing in the world would induce me to marry him.”

  “Acquit me.” István smiled faintly. “I’ll not deny I once thought it would be a good idea, if you could like him, but to be frank, I believe that now is not the best time to be allying yourself with a man whose views are quite so — reactionary.”

  I smiled into my wine glass, watching Katalin’s eyes widen with shock and quickly recover.

  “So I must still make my marriage to suit your interests?” she said indignantly.

  “No,” István said quietly. “To suit yours.”

  She met his gaze squarely. “You know where my interests lie.”

  He sighed. “I know where you think they do.”

  I wiped my mouth delicately with my napkin and ventured, “You must allow her to be constant in her affections.” I was gratified to see the slightly arrested look in his eyes as they met mine. Slowly, he moved his gaze back to Katalin.

  “Do you think of him still? That Romanian?”

  “Captain Zarescu. He has a name!” Katalin said fiercely.

  “It’s a Romanian name,” Mattias observed casually, “but for all that he’s a good fellow. His family have land, you know, east of Kolozsvár. He is a gentleman.”

  He won a huge smile from his sister for this accolade, but István was beginning to look harassed, much to my amusement. “Are you all against me now in this? It’s not my consent she needs!”

  “But a word from you would help,” Katalin said, a certain wheedling note creeping into her voice. István regarded her for a long moment, thoughtful but far from happy.

  “I cannot like it, Katalin,” he said at last.

  “I know that, but in time you will grow used to it. And truly, István, he is the only man I shall ever love.”

  “Oh, rot!” said her brother, driven back to impatience by this unwarranted sentimentality. Katalin opened her mouth to join battle, but I pressed my foot heavily down on hers and she glared at me instead.

  “Leave it,” I murmured under my breath, and after a second, her face cleared. She had scored a point with István and should not now risk setting his back up again, but wait and see the result.

  For me, the other welcome outcome of the Acsádys’ visit was that it prompted our early return to Szelényi. For, apart from his constant carping against Kossuth and the revolution, the Baron brought with him rather frightening reports of trouble in Transylvania. Though I couldn’t actually imagine my grandfather in any danger, I did know relief at the prospect of leaving Pest and Lajos behind me. I would not have to avoid him, or suffer the pain of seeing him and knowing I could not be with him. At times, I woke in the night, the pillow wet under my cheek, my body aching for his touch, and my heart telling me just to go to him, to forget his lack of love for me. He wanted me, and in the hot, restless nights, I longed for that to be enough. Perhaps in Szelényi, I too would find a little peace.

  * * * *

  Before that could happen, however, I found several new anxieties to deal with. The first was when Katalin and I stumbled upon a public meeting outside the Museum. These gatherings were no longer so frequent as in the heady days of March, and this one rather took us by surprise. However, like everyone else in the city, we had grown blasé about organized mobs, so we stayed for a while to listen. At this time, Katalin was making a concerted effort to understand Alexandru’s conflicts of loyalty, so she was almost eager to hear what his radical friends had to say.

  Unfortunately, we had chosen a bad meeting. Amongst other familiar faces, Vasvári and Petöfi were there, and the radical noble, Nyári. So was Lajos, but I noticed that he was a little ap
art from the others and that he sat rather than stood on the steps, as if he was not going to speak.

  The speeches were on the suffrage law, mainly demanding a much lower property qualification than the Diet had set. The mixed crowd were, in the main, quite in favour of this, and lustily cheered each speaker in turn. But I couldn’t help watching Lajos who, sitting so casually on the steps, bore a closer resemblance to a street-urchin than a lawyer. I was reminded unbearably of the first time I had seen him in Vienna. As then, his eyes were on the crowd, but suddenly he turned and looked over his shoulder at Petöfi, who was coming to the end of his speech. In the applause which followed, he stood up, not moving to join the speakers further up, but staying apart as he was. Nevertheless, the crowd quietened expectantly.

  “Why,” he began abruptly, “do we need a property qualification at all?” The crowd was divided on this, but the cheers were still loudest.

  Someone at the front threw a square of red cloth towards him, shouting, “Equality, Lajos! You tell them!” Lajos smiled, deftly catching the red kerchief and threading it through his buttonhole where it waved like a brave flag of defiance in his otherwise plain dress.

  “My friend Táncsics has already told you it is a crime against nature to deprive a man of his voting rights, just for his of lack of property!” He lowered his voice thoughtfully, almost confidingly. “Property, you see, is the problem. Some of us have none; others have more than they can cope with, let alone use. Now: it seems to me we could avoid this whole quagmire simply by redistributing the lot, so that we all have, if not equal shares, then at least a fair amount to live on.”

  My breath caught. He had gone too far. I saw Petöfi start towards him as if involuntarily, then hold back. There was a shocked silence in the crowd, while Lajos stood still, letting the idea sink home.

  Then someone shouted triumphantly, “That would be justice! That would be equality!”

  “It would!” Lajos agreed, raising his voice again to an intense plea. “It would be the ultimate justice! A world in which there is no more poverty, no more envy, no more waste! It is the right of every man, woman and child to have enough. And we can do it — now is the time for change! Don’t let the revolution end here! Let us push towards this greatest goal: deprive the bloated lord of a little wealth, in order to give every peasant land to live on! Take away from the fat and useless, and feed the poor!”