They Were Found Wanting (31 page)

Time and again Balint said to himself that this cat-and-dog existence was no life, no life at all. Now, on Christmas Eve, he felt it even more strongly and made up his mind, which had been strengthened by these endless weeks of separation, that somehow this sterile, frustrating, bleak existence must be ended; and he thought once more of his mother’s obstinate resistance and of Pal Uzdy’s madness and total incompatibility with his wife.

Finally he decided that as soon as Addy came back to Kolozsvar they must definitely arrange her divorce.

However, days and weeks went by and they brought no change. In the middle of January Adrienne wrote and said that she would not be able to move from Almasko for some time to come. Her daughter had developed measles and even though old Countess Uzdy took entire charge of the sickroom and practically denied Adrienne access to her child, she was still unable to get away.

Balint wrote to Gyeroffy at Christmas time and, in his own name and that of his mother, asked him to spend the New Year with them. He also mentioned that he had a letter for him from his aunt, Countess Elise. Laszlo did not answer and did not appear; and so Balint decided one day to take a hired sleigh, drive to Szamos-Kozard, and take his cousin by surprise. It would be better that way for if Laszlo saw one of the easily recognizable Denestornya carriages on the road he might take fright and
vanish
before Balint could find him. It was not far, only about five miles.

There was thick snow everywhere that year and it took nearly three hours for the heavy covered sleigh drawn by three horses to reach the village of Kozard. It was a good sleigh, for at that time there was no lack of excellent vehicles available for hire, and it drove merrily along with a happy jingle of silvery-toned bells. They arrived at midday and drove straight up to the little
country
house on its hilltop.

‘His Lordship is not at home,’ said Marton Balogh, Laszlo’s old manservant. ‘He went down to the village. Perhaps you might find him at the village store. I’m afraid I don’t really know.’

‘When do you expect his Lordship back?’ asked Balint, but the old man merely shrugged his shoulders, thinking that maybe his master had gone down for some country brandy and if that were so then his movements would be totally unpredictable.

Balint decided to walk down the hill and see for himself, and so he started off down the slippery snow-covered slope. Halfway down he met a young farmer, who was also the local civic deputy and who carried an official-looking paper in his hand. Balint asked him where he should find the village store and the young man pointed out the way.

Laszlo was indeed there.

He stood with his back to the shop door and on the other side of the counter was Bischitz, the owner of the shop, who was
standing
just in front of the glazed door which led to his private rooms behind the shop. All around them were the thousand
different
items which made up the stock of a village general shop – by the doors were bunches of harness and tack, scythes, hoes and spades tied together with twine; on the shelves were tobacco, vinegar, spices, sugar, rice, bottles of raw and refined alcohol, glasses, a pyramid of salt-blocks, a barrel of salted herrings and some stiff planks of dried cod leaning against it. From all this came a strong and rather disagreeable odour compounded
principally
of vinegar and tobacco with a strong dominant smell of the local aniseed-flavoured brandy.

When Balint opened the door of the shop a bell rang loudly above his head and Balint just had time to see the shopkeeper seize some bit of porcelain from Laszlo’s hands and whisk it out of sight. Only a bottle of plum brandy, and a single used glass, remained on the counter-top.

‘Well! And what brings you here?’ said Gyeroffy as soon as he saw who had come in. Balint could hear no sign of pleasure or welcome in his cousin’s voice, but rather a strong note of annoyance.

‘I came to see you. As you wouldn’t come to us it has to be a case of the mountain and Mohammed!’ Abady laughed
good-humouredly
. ‘So you see I’ve come to you.’

‘That old fool at the house could have come for me,’ growled Laszlo as he offered his cousin a glass of plum brandy. This Balint refused, with some impatience, saying, ‘If you’ve no further
business
here, we might as well leave, don’t you think?’

Gyeroffy looked hard at him.

‘No! I’ve nothing more to do here; and what there is can wait until this afternoon, can’t it, Bischitz? However I’ll have another dram even if you’re too grand to join me!’ and he swung himself round leaning on the counter in an obviously sulky temper. Bischitz refilled Laszlo’s glass, which the latter drained instantly before demanding another. When that too had been despatched the young man turned back and muttered, ‘Well, we can go now!’

Even so they did not leave at once for at this point the civic deputy came in. He too was looking for Count Gyeroffy.

‘This has come for you from the County Court,’ he said,
handing
Laszlo a sealed letter. Then he opened the book of receipts and said, ‘Sign here, please!’

‘Sign for me, Bischitz,’ said Laszlo, throwing down the official letter and refilling his glass. Abady glanced at the writing on the document which had fallen on the counter in front of him. He picked it up and looked inside. A man called E. Leo Kardos,
resident
of Budapest, had asked the court for a writ of seizure and the auction of Count Gyeroffy’s house and possessions.

‘But this is very serious!’ cried Balint. ‘Look! Everything goes to auction on April 15th!’

‘I’ve had lots of those,’ said Gyeroffy, before turning to the shopkeeper and saying, ‘Send it to Azbej, you know, like the others.’

Balint shook his head. He could hardly credit such fecklessness. ‘Perhaps it would be better if I took it to him?’ he suggested. ‘I’ll be seeing him tomorrow or the day after when I go to Denestornya.’

‘What for? You’ll send it, won’t you, Bischitz? It won’t be the first,’ said Laszlo in a mocking tone.

Now they really did start to go back to Laszlo’s house.

They did not say much to each other on the way. Balint was racking his brains as to how to get Laszlo out of all his trouble and how, too, to wean him from this solitary drinking. Only when they reached the house and had gone up to the former salon of the manor-house, which now served Laszlo as a bed-
sitting-room
, did he take out Countess Elise’s letter to her nephew. Before he handed it over he told Laszlo how lovingly they all thought about him at Jablanka, Aunt Elise, Magda, Pfaffulus, everybody … but he did not mention either Klara or Imre Warday.

A little stove had been installed in front of the French marble chimney-piece. A fire was burning in it and the smoke and fumes were led into the chimney by a rusty black metal tube. Laszlo stood beside the stove without saying a word, his eyes fixed upon the window and on the grey wintry sky beyond. He said nothing during Balint’s long story about his cousins, and he still said
nothing
when Balint came to the end of his tale and handed over the letter. For a moment he held the envelope in his hand, then he waved it twice in the air before his face before grabbing it with both hands and tearing it to pieces unopened. With his boots still covered with snow he kicked the bits of paper into the fireplace surround.

This was such a surprise that Abady jumped up in protest, only to find that Laszlo was quite calm, saying, ‘I’ve done with that world for ever, do you understand? I don’t want anything from it and I don’t want to hear anything from it. Nothing! Nothing at all! For me those people no longer exist. For all I can care they may be dead, or they may never have existed. Never! Never!’

‘Why do you reject everyone who loves you and wants to help you?’ asked Balint gently.

‘I don’t
want
anyone to help me! Why can’t you all leave me in peace? Especially all those, those … there in Hungary!’ Laszlo was shouting now, and getting increasingly agitated as he whirled about the dirty, untidy room where every piece of furniture was piled with filthy unwashed articles of clothing and the ragged sofa covered in old books and papers.

His cousin felt deeply sorry for him and so he moved across the room and joined him. ‘All right! All right! Nobody’s forcing you to anything,’ he said, and then, so as to give Laszlo time to simmer down, took him by the arm and started walking up and down the room, chatting trivially about a number of other
subjects
. As they did so they passed several times the corner of the room where there stood a delicate old glass-fronted vitrine. Its dusty velvet-covered shelves were now almost empty. In one
corner
there was an old chipped Meissen coffee-pot and beside it a matching sugar bowl with a long crack on one side, things no one would buy. In several places imprints on the velvet, less dusty than elsewhere, showed where other objects had once been placed. So this is where the governor’s cup came from! thought Balint, and realized why even today the shopkeeper had been in such a hurry to hide something. With his usual instinctive urge to help others Balint, without thinking, stepped over to the vitrine and said, ‘You’ve been selling the china, haven’t you?’

Laszlo did not reply.

‘Look, my dear fellow, if you really have to part with family things it’s absurd to give them away for practically nothing to the village store. My mother and I would be only too pleased to have a valuation made and give you the proper price. Far better than let it go to waste!’

Laszlo screamed at him, ‘Leave me alone, all of you! I don’t need telling how to run my life. If I want to go to hell, I’ll go to hell. And I’ll sell what I please to whom I please and when I want to. As for you, you can stop sticking your nose into other people’s business!’

Now it was Abady’s turn to get angry. He turned away and left the room without saying another word.

Laszlo followed him out slowly. Only now did he realize how offensive he had been to the only man who had been a faithful friend to him as long as he could remember. He wanted somehow to make amends, but was not quite sure how. By the time Laszlo reached the head of the stairs his cousin had almost reached the bottom, so he called out, ‘My love to Aunt Roza! As soon as I get some money I’ll come over to pay my respects. Do forgive me, Balint, please. I’ve become such an ill-tempered bear these days,’ and he turned and went back to his room. Despite the implied olive branch he still could not resist the temptation to slam the door behind him.

W
EEKS WENT
BY
and it was the end of March before Balint was able to get back home to Kolozsvar. Parliament had now been adjourned after a winter session made monotonous by a series of futile verbal battles, mostly about the proposed new House Rules. The only serious piece of legislation to receive the assent of the House was the motion concerning land reform in Transylvania. This was the first tangible result of the Szekler
congress
at Homorod. It was only a modest beginning to what Balint was anxious to bring about, but at least it was a first step. The rest of the debates were given over to meaningless obstructive measures put forward by those who wished to embarrass the
government
; or resentful echoes of matters the Hungarian
representatives
had discussed in Vienna, particularly a proposition made there by the Hungarian Minister of Defence concerning army officers’ pay.

There seemed to be some connection, though no one was quite sure what, between these events and the reappearance on the political scene of Kristoffy. At the beginning of March his banner arose again when he presided over a political meeting called to announce the formation of a new so-called ‘Radical’ party. Since his resignation from office Kristoffy had been in close touch with the Heir and the party which surrounded him. When he had been a Minister he had, of course, been a faithful servant of the old King, but now he had transferred his allegiance.

The Radical party itself existed only on paper. It was a sort of slogan to be brandished only by those few university professors, do-gooding intellectuals and the recently-formed Galileo Circle made up of cranky university students who described themselves as ‘citizens of the world’ or ‘superopeans’. The group was of
thoroughly
bourgeois character and as it included neither socialists nor anyone of the working class, it was not taken seriously by the general public, particularly as Kristoffy, as a former member of the unpopular Bodyguard government, was generally thought of as politically tainted. Nevertheless, though of course it was not then realized, it was from these sources that flowed the current that, ten years later, would lead to revolution. Neither, of course, was it then known that Kristoffy had sold his soul to the Belvedere Palace.

For Balint these weeks passed slowly. He went to meetings, to sessions of Parliament, to dinners and evening parties, but he felt his life to be meaningless and empty. He tried to take up once again the half-philosophical, half-doctrinal treatise that he had started to write under the spur of his love for Adrienne but which he had dropped when it seemed that this love was doomed never to be fulfilled. Then it had been a song of love, for Addy had not yet been his and his yearning for her had inspired every line.

Now that he had not seen her for several months his desire for her had in some way been strengthened and he determined not to put off any longer serious plans for their future life together.

While they had been able to meet frequently this thought had not been so compelling. Even when they had had to take extra care in planning their secret meetings – and days had often gone by without any opportunity of seeing each other – the intervals of separation had never been prolonged and this gave them both the feeling of belonging to each other, almost indeed of their
living
together with his absences caused only by his work. The
previous
spring, summer and autumn had passed in this manner. Balint had often had to absent himself for political reasons, for his work for the co-operative projects or simply to look after the Abady lands and interests at Denestornya and in the mountains; but all this time, because they both knew that they would soon be together again, these absences did not seem to matter. But for the last three months, three long months, things had not been the same. They had had no opportunity to meet at all and their
situation
was far from happy. There was no way now that they could meet; they were inexorably shut off from any contact. If Adrienne had fallen ill he would not have been able to go to her or help her in any way. He could only wait in the hope of perhaps hearing something by chance gossip just as if he were a stranger. It was dreadful and deeply frustrating. Adrienne managed
occasionally
to write and this was how he learned that her daughter’s attack of measles had developed complications, that the girl’s convalescence would be slow and that she could not leave her side until the child was completely recovered. Waiting …waiting … waiting …

As the days passed into weeks and the weeks into months Balint’s determination grew ever stronger: he must somehow force Adrienne to seek a divorce. They had to marry.

There were only two obstacles in the way, and from a distance both now seemed to him far less formidable than they had
previously
. The main problem was Uzdy, and Adrienne always insisted he would never let her go. Although she never said it, behind her words lay the conviction that he would rather kill both her and the man she dared to love. But was this really so or merely a fantasy of hers, an imagined nightmare? It was true that he was a deeply confused, unstable man, who was obsessed with firearms and always carried a revolver … and whose father had died insane. She knew that none of this constituted proof, for he had taken it quite calmly when she had refused to sleep with him. Balint had taken heart at this; but what he did not know, for Addy had not told him, was that the following day Uzdy had followed them like a hunter stalking his prey. So for Balint it seemed that all they had to do was to face the situation, confront Uzdy, and tell him openly …

The other seemingly insurmountable problem was his own mother. She hated Adrienne and would certainly oppose any plans they might make for a life together. Her hatred of Adrienne was unreasoning and senseless and, thought Balint, quite unfathomable. Aware of his mother’s dominant and intractable character he knew that it would be far from easy to get her to change her opinions, all the more so since in every other way he had, until now, done everything to please her and avoid giving her pain. And if now he were to defy her and challenge her authority? He was deeply sorry for the sorrow he was bound to cause her and, until recently, had thought that their relationship would be destroyed by such a marriage. Now, however, he tried to make himself believe that the inevitable rift would heal, that his mother’s anger would fade and that, in time, she would come to love Adrienne as soon as she had allowed herself to get to know her. Balint, in his loneliness, went on weaving new dreams. He convinced himself that the coldness would pass, that the first grandchild would come, that grandchild for which Countess Roza had always yearned and to whom she constantly referred, and that when there was an heir, a boy, of course, someone to carry on the line … but here Balint’s arguments would dwindle away to be replaced by his yearning for a home-life of his own, for a woman who was his companion in life, who would be a mother to his children – who was a mother already – sitting by a peaceful fireplace, a life without problems, a life of occupation and love and lightness of heart and children for whom it would be a joy to toil.

Wherever he found himself Balint was obsessed by these
fantasies
: in his seat in the House when surrounded by noisy argument and endless speech-making, at the rooms in the Casino Club where all his acquaintance were still arguing about politics, at formal dinners or at evening parties while languidly drawling sweet nothings to whichever lady happened to be sitting next to him: wherever he was he was like a sleep-walker. Young Magda Szent-Gyorgyi, with her quick-sighted birdlike eyes, had noticed it at once and said to him outright, ‘Whatever have you been doing to get so absent-minded? I suppose you’ve been out
carousing
with the ladies of the town, what?’ for Magda liked to talk in this way so as to show off how knowledgeable she was about
relationships
between the sexes. ‘You’ve lost weight too!’ she added laughing. ‘Tell me, do tell me, is all that very … very …’ and she broke off not quite able to put into words the rather uncertain ideas that were floating around in her inquisitive little head.

Finally, in the middle of March, the long-hoped-for message arrived. Her husband’s mother was going to take the child to Meran where it was hoped she would recover more quickly, and this meant that in a few days’ time Adrienne would be free to come to the Uzdy villa just outside the town. Her young sister Margit would be with her and they would both be there in time to run their own stall at the charity bazaar which was held each year for the benefit of the orphanage. At last they would see each other again.

The bazaar organized annually by the Archduchess
Maria-Valeria
Circle was a great event in Kolozsvar. Every lady with any pretensions to a position in Society joined in the
preparations
, the older matrons acted as official patronesses and the younger ones, and the unmarried girls, manned the stalls and, for one day, pretended to be salesgirls. At each stand there were two or three of them, at least one from an aristocratic family, the others from the prosperous middle-classes.

There was much jockeying for position in the days that led up to the bazaar itself, for there was considerable rivalry as to who should sell what and in what part of the hall their tent-like stands should be erected. It was not only important to have one of the best positions, it was also hotly disputed who should be placed next to whom and important to make sure that no one was
displaying
the same merchandise as their neighbours. It was not easy, either, to invent something new and original which might therefore lead to that great triumph of receiving more money than anyone else. The decoration of the stands was therefore also extremely important. It had to be at the same time striking and sufficiently open to attract buyers while being discreet and
intimate
enough to make them sit down, chat, and open their purses to be milked of every penny they had brought with them. To ensure this was the job of all the prettiest young girls.

The hall in which the bazaar was held was known as the
Redut
– a local corruption of the Viennese
Redoutensaal
named after the masked balls which were held there. The Kolozsvar
Redut
, which was built in the eighteenth century, had once been the seat of the Transylvanian Parliament. Now it was used for balls – and for the great charity bazaar. It was very large and had an
immensely
high ceiling.

On each side of the main hall there were other rooms. On the occasion of the bazaar, one of these was used as a changing room for the amateur artistes who would later give a theatrical
entertainment
, while the other was made into a sort of drawing-room where the older ladies could withdraw to rest and have some
coffee
or other light refreshments. Near the door of the first room was a raised platform where there were placed chairs for the Lady Patronesses and which would later serve as a temporary stage. Down the full length of the hall were placed the tent-like stands which were so close to each other that it was difficult to pass between them. Each was different. Some of the stall-holders had used Persian carpets as decoration, others were hung with long streaming ribbons, or peasant embroideries, or bales of silks in a myriad brilliant colours. And as to the goods on sale they were as varied as the colours of the stands themselves. Everything was there from home-brewed liqueurs to delicate needlework. It was a vivid scene suggesting an oriental market which happened to be taking place not in the open air but in a rococo ballroom. And in the centre of each stand there was an elegant lady and some smiling girls ready to tempt the cash out of anyone’s purse.

A large number of men were strolling up and down the wide alley between the open stalls.