Balint again bade farewell to all that lay before him, to the beauty by which he had been surrounded since his childhood, and to all those dreams which had come to such a sad end.
By now those merry bands of eager young men had passed on their way. Gone were the farm carts and baggage. Balint was alone. He returned to the car and drove on.
The road descended steeply into the valley, which was now in deep shadow. He crossed a bridge and then there came a sharp bend.
Here too he was assailed by memories, for it was just there that two years before, on returning to Denestornya, full of happiness after the evening when he had seen Adrienne again at the performance of Madam Butterfly at Kolozsvar, he had met Gazsi Kadacsay. Once again he fancied he could see Gazsi as he cantered towards him on his well-fed little pony. Poor Gazsi! His house was not visible from there, that house where his unhappy friend had killed himself from despair at his wasted life and because the culture for which he had yearned had seemed forever beyond his reach.
Banishing such thoughts, he drove on, determined not to waste time regretting the past.
When he reached the foothills of the Felek the car was again delayed because the road was everywhere encumbered by droves of white oxen and bullocks on their way to the slaughterhouse where they would be killed to feed the army.
He drove on slowly, for he often had to stop because the road was so crowded. About a hundred yards from the next pass the engine boiled – white steam spurting out of the radiator. As there was no water to be had nearby the chauffeur went back down the road to find a well. Balint walked on up to the summit to wait there until rejoined by the car.
In front of him lay a wonderful landscape in the centre of which was Kolozsvar. To the right the Szamos curved away until, at Apahida, it disappeared to the north. On his left lay the valley of Gyalu and beyond it a range of snow-capped mountains.
Behind him the sun went down below the horizon. But there was still light enough to see what lay before him.
He leaned against the stone wall by the road, still consciously bidding farewell to all he saw.
Not far away below there was a butter-yellow building beside the Monostor Road. It was the Uzdy villa, and beside it Balint could make out the break in the palings of the garden, just where lay the little gate to the bridge through which, in happier times, he had so often passed on his way to visit Adrienne.
Not far away was the green-tiled roof of the asylum where Pal Uzdy had died and, a little to the right, was the theatre from which he had fled so precipitously on finding Adrienne in the next box on the night of the opera. There too was the hill of the Harzongard where he had walked with Adrienne in the first spring of their ten years of love for each other.
All his life lay before him, his whole past, everything. Even Kozard, where Laszlo lay buried. He wanted to say farewell to him too, and he searched the distance through his binoculars for a sight of the manor house at Kozard and the Gyeroffy family vault just above it. It lay at the most northerly point of the Szamos valley; and there it was, a tiny patch of white, a little triangle on the left bank.
A deep bitterness came over him as he stood there alone, high above the world he had known and which was now doomed to perish.
In his mind’s eye he saw too the whole generation to which he belonged, that generation, still young, which had grown up in that long period of peace that had followed the troubled years before 1867. It was the men of his generation that had come after those years of reform and who were the successors of such men as Deak, Eotvos, Miko, and Andrassy, who had lived through the nightmare of the revolution and the repression which followed, who had learned from their tribulations and who had known how to meet troubles with calm and moderation.
But this generation, Balint’s own, had drifted farther and farther away from the practical wisdom of their forebears. Reality had been gradually replaced by self-deception, conceit and sheer wrong-headed obstinacy.
Everyone was guilty, all the upper strata of Hungarian society.
He saw before him the entire class of great land-owners, spoilt by an arrogance that had led them to neglect the good management of their estates, preferring to vie for pompous offices of state and political advantage. He saw the professors of history, who thought only of the revolutionary struggle against the Habsburg domination and who denigrated those who would have encouraged the Hungarian people to self-knowledge and hard work, with the result that the minds of the young had been filled only with illusory ideals and chauvinistic slogans. From the turn of the century his generation had been fed with self-congratulatory theories which had so misled it that any criticism was at once dismissed as unpatriotic.
He saw before him the magnates and noble families who thought only of social prominence, who forgot their European affiliations and threw the weight of their great fortunes and moral influence behind all that nationalistic nonsense of which they did not believe a word and which, in consequence, had poisoned the nation’s politics.
All this he saw before him, just as if he were looking back from beyond the grave.
Now this beloved country would perish, and with it most of his generation. It would perish with this meaningless war; for until now those rousing battle-cries had only meant a call to wars of words and speechifying and argument; and the repeated exhortations to hold out to the last man had only meant not to speak until the end of a debate, and were far from the true murderous reality.
Now this land would perish, and with it that deluded generation that had given importance only to theories, phrases and formulae, that had ignored all reality, that had chased like children after the fata morgana of mirage and illusion, that had turned away from everything on which their strength was based, that denied the vital importance of power and self-criticism and national unity.
One virtue alone remained: the will to fight.
And that too would prove in vain.
The town below was now in darkness. Night had fallen.
Only the sky in the west flamed with life.
Long shreds of cloud floated high; ash-coloured strips with shining tassels touched the far horizon. Around and beneath them fire, everywhere fire. The whole world beyond the horizon seemed to be in flames. On the line of the horizon itself the colour was blood-red, rising in the blinding heat of tongues of fire, fiery tears along its whole length as if the whole universe wept burning ash into an ocean of blood. Below the red inferno of the sky were etched heavy, dark-lilac-coloured mountain peaks, their hard-edged contours merging into some endless monolith; they were the mountains of Gyalu and the Magura and, behind them, the mighty Vlegyassa itself.
Vast stony ridges that slanted upwards to the sky.
Giant coffins, a people’s tombstones.
In motionless majesty they stood there beneath a world in flames.
The car arrived.
Balint started the descent from the summit.
THE END
Bonczhida, May 20th, 1940
About the Author
Count Miklós Bánffy (1873–1950) was variously a diplomat, MP and foreign minister in 1921–22 when he signed the peace treaty with the United States and obtained Hungary’s admission to the League of Nations. He was responsible for organising the last Habsburg coronation, that of King Karl in 1916. His famous Transylvanian Trilogy, They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting, They Were Divided was first published in Budapest in the 1930s.
Co-translators Katalin Bánffy-Jelen and Patrick Thursfield won the 2002 Weidenfeld Translation Prize presented by Umberto Eco.
Count Miklós Bánffy (1873-1950)
Copyright
First published in English in 2001
by Arcadia Books Books, 15-16 Nassau Street, London, W1W 7AB
This ebook edition first published in 2011
All rights reserved
© Miklós Bánffy, 1940
© Translation from the Hungarian, Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen, 2001
The right o
f Miklós Bánffy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–1–908129–04–8
They Were Divided Page 43