“What is it?” I said inadequately. “What in the world is going on?”
And at last, recognition dawned in her fearful face. Behind her, the other servants had come to a reluctant halt, jostling each other on the stairs so that I imagined my presence was only a temporary hindrance to their plans. Their faces were grim, angry, contorted out of all familiarity. Uncomprehendingly, I looked from them back to the timid maid.
“Help me, madam,” she whispered. “Dear God, help me...”
“Of course I shall help you, if somebody will tell me what this is all about.” I tried to speak calmly, but I think even then I knew in the pit of my stomach that this had gone beyond me.
“You can’t protect her!” cried one of the footmen. “The murdering little...”
“Murdering?” I repeated involuntarily.
“I never,” gasped the maid. “I never killed anyone! How could I?”
It was what I was wondering myself, but before I could voice doubt, the servants all burst out at once, “Your people did! It’s the same thing! Your people are killing...”
Of course. The girl was a Romanian. Had I ever recognized the fact before? This was a racial fight.
“Oh for Heaven’s sake!” I interrupted impatiently. “You can’t blame her for atrocities committed anywhere—”
“Not anywhere,” I was interrupted in my turn. “Here!”
That silenced me for at least five seconds. I counted the beats of my heart, staring at the speaker. I swallowed. “What has happened?”
They began to tell me, all at once, with anger and fear, while sheltering behind me the little Romanian maid shook like a leaf. I knew how she felt. Apparently, the Romanian minority in the village beyond Szelényi — still owned by the Count, of course — had turned on their Magyar neighbours only this morning, looting and burning and killing; and significantly, they were helped by other Romanians who had arrived in the village last night. They had, I inferred, been incited by the strangers, but now it sounded as if full scale war had broken out.
So it had come here at last, the race-violence which even Lajos feared, and just when he and Alex had done so much to try to build trust between their peoples.
“Does the Count know about this?” I said slowly.
Not only did he know, he had gone there.
“With soldiers?” I said in surprise. “Already?”
But apparently there were no soldiers with him, although he had sent to Vanora for them. In fact, he had gone alone, with neither son nor servant to protect him. It crossed my mind, briefly, that he hadn’t known all the facts. He didn’t know what he was walking into...
“The soldiers will sort it out,” I said calmly, “and punish those responsible.” As if this would make everything all right again. “It is not for you to take it out on the one Romanian who is so obviously innocent. Now, go back to work.”
I didn’t wait to see if they would obey me. I was fairly sure they would not. Instead, I walked quickly away, pushing the timid maid in front of me.
“Will you be safe here?” I asked her abruptly.
“I want to go home,” she whispered, by way of an answer.
I nodded. “Go then.” God knew what she would find there, if the stories were only half-true, but my own mind was fixed only on my grandfather, on the danger he was walking into; and, for some reason, the fact that I hadn’t apologised to him for my behaviour last night, though surely that was unimportant now...
In the stables, I learned that he was only ten minutes ahead of me.
“Saddle me the mare, then, quickly,” I urged. “I can still catch him.”
Mark stared at me. “You’ll never turn him back. Not the Count...”
“Do it,” I said fiercely.
He did it. And I, without waiting even to tell István or Mattias — after all I had no intention of letting either of us get into serious danger — galloped off in pursuit of my grandfather. I wasn’t sure how I would do it, but I was determined to turn him back before he reached the fighting — it would come to Szelényi, and to the castle itself soon enough, unless the soldiers were extraordinarily quick.
I had never ridden so fast in Szelényi, nor so improperly dressed. I didn’t even have a hat, but there was no one in the fields to be outraged. In fact, I saw no one at all, until I had ridden across the hill and finally reined in above the tiny village. This was where all the people were.
“Oh no,” I said aloud. “Oh no.” For now I could see fires in the fields as well as in the village. I could see groups of men fighting with fists and feet and farm tools, others running from place to place, shouting, enraged. And ahead of me, I could see my grandfather, ram-rod straight in the saddle, motionlessly watching his people do their best to exterminate each other; but even as I called to him, he spurred forward, unheeding. His deafness had never seemed so frustrating.
There was nothing I could do but follow him, and try to catch up. In the end, we were in the village itself before I could get near him; and that was like riding into a nightmare. Huddles of crying women and children, Magyar and Romanian, were crouched in the road just outside the village. I thought some of them were injured, even dead. Involuntarily, I stopped beside a woman who was weeping uncontrollably over a still child.
“What can I do?” I said with desperation. I didn’t even know if there was a doctor in the district. Certainly I had never heard of one. But the woman turned on me such a look of fierce anger mingled with her awful grief, that I rode on. There was nothing I could do, not for them.
I saw Alex first. He stood helplessly on the edge of the square before the Orthodox Church, where most of the fighting seemed to be. His hands clutched at his hair in a gesture of helplessness that was almost a caricature; but as I watched, he dropped to his knees beside some wounded creature. Directly opposite him, on the church steps, stood the Orthodox priest, his arms raised in some sort of desperate prayer for people who didn’t even hear him. And I knew some of these people: there was Gábor from the stables, in tears, dragging someone away from a burning cottage; and Zoltán Lázár in the thick of the fighting, using his fists with vicious energy.
And then I saw Lajos. Dressed just as the others, yet standing out from them, even in this carnage, he was snatching a blazing torch from a man’s hand, throwing it on the ground under his feet. Shouting constantly, he pushed the man towards the priest; and then, recklessly, he threw himself into the middle of a vicious looking fight. I closed my eyes, sure he would be stabbed by the farm fork being wielded so furiously in the mêlée. When I opened them again he was no longer among these men — they had actually stopped fighting and were looking towards the priest; and Lajos was several yards away, pulling one man off another by his shirt, still shouting something at the top of his voice.
He’s stopping it, I thought in wonder, in the beginnings of hope. Gradually, he is stopping it...
Belatedly, I remembered my grandfather, who had brought me here in the first place. Suddenly frightened for him again, I looked wildly around until I caught sight of him at the foot of the hill behind the church, beginning to move along the side of it towards the priest. Following quickly, I saw Lajos leap up the steps beside the priest, his shirt torn and patchy with dirt and blood; and now I could hear his voice above the others as he shouted. He had their attention; they were listening; and gradually as more and more people stopped to hear him, others paused to see why, and then they listened too. And yet, judging by the carnage of the village and its environs, it had taken him a long time to get even this far.
I could hear his words now, a jumble of Hungarian and Romanian, beseeching peace.
“We are not enemies!” I heard him cry, his voice so hoarse that I knew it must be painful. “It is madness to turn on each other — that is what the true enemy wants of us, to weaken us! My God, how much weaker are we now, after this? We have made new wounds when we should be healing, growing strong enough to make our own future...!”
The noise was so m
uch less now that I could hear the catcalls quite distinctly; but it was the strangers who made them. People I recognized were shaking off the jeerers. The villagers knew Lajos: it was for him they had turned out at Szelényi Castle last year and stood side by side with their Magyar and Szekely neighbours, people whom they had just now been trying to destroy. And the Hungarians, in this case not the aggressors, began to lose the light of righteous battle which had been in all their faces, as it had been in the castle servants’. Some of the women even began to creep back into the village.
Riding quietly down the side of the church in my grandfather’s wake, I finally came to a halt beside him. But he didn’t even notice me. His eyes were fixed on Lajos’s face, and I could see from the set of his shoulders that he was angry. Still and always angry...
“In the name of the revolution we all believe in, stop this,” Lajos was saying, “before we have nothing left...”
“Romanians have nothing to start with!” someone shouted. One of the strangers. And Lajos turned on him at once, in his own language. It was working, I thought. God knew how long this damage would take to heal, but at least he was stopping it from getting any worse.
And then, into the pregnant, thoughtful silence which followed his speech, my grandfather said suddenly, “Well, Lajos? Satisfied?” And Lajos swung round so quickly that he had no time to guard his expression.
“Oh Jesus Christ, not you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
There was a bleeding cut below his eye, where he had got too close to flailing fists. Involuntarily, he dragged his hand through his hair as if he couldn’t deal with this; and with a sudden return of fear, I realized that he was afraid, afraid of what my grandfather would do to the situation.
The peasants too now saw the old Count for the first time — I could tell from the threatening rumble which rippled round the crowd.
My grandfather was speaking with barely controlled rage. “You think you can fix this with a few speeches? Go on, tell me how you can fix it!”
“Fix it? I can’t. We all have to...”
But my grandfather would not let him speak. Already he was interrupting, his old voice louder now than Lajos’s poor, worn out one. “No, of course you can’t. But you began it, didn’t you, Lajos? You roused the people, and this is the result. It’s your fault.”
At that, I made a noise of distress, as if to contradict him, and for a second, Lajos’s eyes flickered to me. I saw pain in them, quickly veiled; and then he had turned back to the peasants.
“It’s no fault of the people to be roused to the injustice of their lives,” he declared. “We all know about injustice!”
“Except him!” someone shouted, pointing at my grandfather in loathing. “Except the great lord!”
“And the lord is a Magyar!” one of the Romanians said grimly.
“Aye, the worst Magyar of the lot!” said another, and turned and struck his Hungarian neighbour in the face, while the others, indescribably threatening, heaved forward as one towards us.
I was appalled. And then Lajos had stepped in front of us.
“I am a Magyar!” he cried in his new, hoarse voice, and reluctantly the mob was still again, though only just.
Someone shouted, “Yes, so what gives you the right to speak for us?”
“Shouldn’t we all speak up for each other?” Lajos returned at once; but with despair, I saw that he had lost them. He had been losing them since they had first seen my grandfather. There was just too much hatred bottled up in all of them against their tyrannical old lord. The only way Lajos could control them now was to unite them against their common foe, the Count, and this, I saw with mingled relief and distress, he would not do. He understood only too well the nature of the mobs he had brought into being.
Fights were breaking out again. I saw Alex pushing two women behind him, away from the violence. And then a stone landed with a thud only inches from my grandfather’s horse, startling both our animals. Through their frightened whinnying — and my own — I heard Lajos saying, “But certainly, speak for yourselves! Here is your lord — speak to him!”
But they had done with speaking. Impatiently, almost furiously, I laid my hand on my grandfather’s arm.
“Come away, Grandfather,” I pleaded. “He can do nothing when you are here!”
But my grandfather did not move. I felt him tense under my fingers. His breathing was fast and ragged and, I realized with sudden new dread, painful.
“Grandfather?” I said, anxiously, and then Lajos was there, all but lifting him off his horse in front of my frightened eyes.
Lajos said something over his shoulder to the priest, then to me, “Help me get him inside. Open the door.”
Wordlessly I obeyed, sliding to my feet and pushing open the church door for Lajos to carry my grandfather inside. The door closed on the noise, on the fights breaking out all over again.
Lajos was on his knees, easing my grandfather onto the hard, wooden floor. I couldn’t speak for the fear clutching at my heart, but I found I was kneeling beside him, loosening his tie with hands that trembled, while he lay in his pain, staring not at me but at Lajos.
“It’s your doing!” he panted. “Yours!”
Lajos’s face never changed. Sitting back on his heels, he said only, “Perhaps.” And I saw my grandfather’s eyes search his, one to the other. When he spoke, his voice was stronger, but it still sounded strange to me.
“You agree with me? Now why does that worry me more than all the rest? Am I dying?”
I made a small, meaningless gesture of distress. For a moment, I could hear only my own heart, then Lajos said evenly, “I don’t know. The priest is sending for the doctor.”
But now, perversely, my grandfather gave a funny, rueful smile and said simply, “Too late.”
“No,” I whispered, and he turned and looked at me. There was no recognition in his eyes. Impatiently, he turned back to Lajos.
“You must be delighted,” he ground out, his hands clutching involuntarily at the renewed pain in his heart. “At last...”
“Why should I be?” said Lajos. He sounded indifferent, and I saw that he was listening to the noise from outside; it was growing increasingly wild without him. And yet he didn’t move. For some reason, he would not leave the dying old man who was his enemy.
“You hate me,” my grandfather said conversationally, and then, when Lajos’s eyes had come back to him, he added with sudden bitterness, “A hundred times more than those poor fools out there, you hate me!”
A groan of purely physical pain was wrenched from him. His eyes clenched shut, then slowly opened.
Lajos said, “I don’t hate you. I never hated you. Only what you stand for.”
At that, a terrifying, rattling laugh broke from my grandfather. “Nothing personal, is that it, Lajos?”
A pause, then, “Yes,” said Lajos. “That’s it.”
“Liar,” said my grandfather tiredly.
Lajos stirred. “No. I have no right to judge you. My own behaviour — to you — has not always been — exemplary.”
The old man’s eyes widened, then relaxed. “Oh. That,” he said dismissively. “I was glad to give you the money in the end. I watched you, waited to see how far you could go before you fell, or before you abandoned your principles and chased power and wealth like everyone else. And every time you didn’t, God help me, I was proud of you.”
Lajos’s gaze did not falter, but I saw his fingers twist suddenly together before he stilled them.
“You had the right to be,” he said quietly. “I learned a lot from you.”
I was not part of this. I felt as if I should not even be there. And then, into the strange peace which had sprung up between them, something crashed suddenly against the church door. I jumped, jerked unpleasantly back into reality. My grandfather gasped; his hand reached up, claw-like, grasping at Lajos.
“Don’t let them in! Don’t let them see me like this, Lajos — for God’s sake leave me that m
uch dignity...”
Lajos’s hand turned, clasping the gnarled old fingers. “For any sake you like, I’ll keep them away. I promise.”
Satisfied, my grandfather fell back, eyes closed as if in sleep. He still held on to Lajos’s hand, and Lajos let it lie there, unmoving. For a long time none of us stirred. I felt very cold, very alone, an onlooker at a scene charged with a tension I didn’t understand. Yet the tension was not in my grandfather, not any more. I had never seen him as contented as he seemed in those few minutes when he lay quietly trusting in the protection of the young man who was his enemy, the enemy of everything he believed in.
Nothing personal. No. Something very personal. To each of them. I found myself wondering if this was yet another reason for István’s hatred, this strange pride of the old man in his peasant protégé.
At last, when something else crashed against the church door, Lajos slid his hand free and stood up. He didn’t look at me as he went quickly to the door, which was already opening. The noise grew briefly louder; I saw Lajos push somebody outside with him, and then the door closed again. My grandfather seemed to be sleeping, though his breath was so laboured I didn’t see how. I heard Lajos’s voice from the steps outside, quiet at first, then raised in anger. A moment later, the door reopened and he came back in alone, and stood there by the door, quite still.
But something had alerted my grandfather. He was staring up at me now.
“Sofia? Is it Sofia, come back after all these years?”
Now, now I wanted to cry.
“No,” I whispered, swallowing back the tears. “It’s Katie.”
“Katie,” he repeated. “Katie.” And I had no way of knowing if the name meant anything to him. I couldn’t hear his breathing now. His eyes were staring into mine, but slowly, their dull light was fading.
A World to Win Page 34