Csardas (82 page)

In the distance, across the fields, he saw the smudge of buildings and he swung his rucksack to the other shoulder and wiped sweat from his neck. Soon he could complete this ridiculous mission and go home, to a future he had carved for himself and where Nicky could be his friend or not as he pleased. He stared at the village—something wrong—and realized that the shape and colour of it had changed. It was dirtier, flatter... bombed. His heart quickened, as did his pace. He did not want his sister to be dead—even though they meant little to each other he did not want her to be dead. He did not want the others to be dead either; if he found their bodies he would have to tell Nicky—he shut the thought down and ran towards the ruined houses. The main street was flattened, just walls and chimneys rising from heaps of rubble. There were still some houses in the side streets, whole houses, and some that could be lived in even though they were damaged. He ran into the maze of smashed clay and earth, finding his way unerringly amidst the blurred roads to the house that had been his sister’s. It wasn’t there.

He stared, unbelieving. It wasn’t the first time he had seen a battered village, but this was his sister’s home, and now there was nothing, just some remnants of wall and fireplace, not even broken furniture—nothing. He clambered over the wall and began to tear at the rubbish. “Elza? Elza?”

“They’ve gone.” Behind him an old woman—why did the war seem to leave nothing but old women?—leaned on a stick and watched him over the wall. “They went before the Russians came; quite a few did. They decided to go back behind the German lines.”

Fool! Elza had always been a fool. Did she think by continually moving back before the advancing line she could miss the war? The nearer they got to Germany the worse it was going to be. Why hadn’t she stayed and got the unnerving transition over with?

“If she had stayed,” the old woman said cannily, “she would have been killed when the shell hit the house.”

“Of course. Thank you,” he said coldly, and then, as she began to move away, “Do you know what happened to the—the people who were staying with her, a dark-haired woman with her daughter and son?”

The old woman’s eyes glittered maliciously. “The Jews, you mean?” she asked. “The Jews with false papers?”

Shock again. Jews? The family he had feared and hated and thought of for so long, dismissed merely as Jews with false papers?

“What happened to them? Did the Gestapo—’’

“No.” She shrugged. “We knew they were Jews but we never told; we never told the Germans anything. And they paid well—your sister had money arrive every month—but when the Germans began to retreat your sister said that the Jews could not go back with her. It was too dangerous. The Gestapo would have killed her for helping them.”

“So they went... somewhere else?” he asked. She was already walking away, shuffling along between the rubble, bending now and again to see if there was anything worth salvaging on the road.

“They stayed here. They’re living in what is left of the Dobi house, up on the left, next door to where the butcher used to be.”

He began to run, and as he did so he felt that old familiar implosion of happiness. He had succeeded; he had found them. Nicky, Nicky, I’ve found them for you. Your family, a little more family for you so that you will not be quite alone when you realize your mother will never come back. For a moment, as he ran, jumping over heaps of dirt and clay, he
was
Nicky, running to meet them, Aunt Eva, Terez, George. They were safe, and he had found them.

There were two walls, a mountain of rubble, a chimney, and part of a roof. Someone had piled up pieces of stone to form a fourth low protection against the wind. The makeshift wall obviously kept falling, because that someone was trying to rebuild it, filling a basket with broken stones and trying to block up the holes.

“Terez!” She turned, and his stomach twisted suddenly and he couldn’t say anything else. That face again, that thin, ill, but smiling face with the bright brown eyes and the hope not yet killed, the face he thought he had left behind him back in the town, the face of a happy child who had been made desolate by the war. The face, framed by thick curly hair in braids, stared at him, unbelieving. It crumpled, and then the eyes widened, just the way Nicky’s did.

“Janos! Janos Marton! From home! You’ve come from home!” The girl’s body—how tiny she was, how thin and tiny—was against him, her arms clinging round his neck, her face buried hard into his chest. “You’ve come from home,” she sobbed. “You’ll help us! That’s why you’ve come, to help us!” Her arms had dropped from his neck and were riveted around his waist, her head boring into his chest. “Dear, dear Janos! From home!”

He had never comforted anyone except his mother, but for a moment he found he knew how to do it—you put your arms back round them and rocked a little—only for a moment, and then the astonishment and horror of what was happening became uppermost and, gently, he pushed the girl away.

“Terez? Who is it?” The querulous voice helped. It came from behind the shelter and it was curious to hear it like this, the voice that he had only heard distantly before, talking to servants, now coming from a ruin while he held the voice’s daughter in his arms.

“It’s Janos, Mama! Janos Marton from home! He’s come to help us. He’ll get us better and then take us home again. You will, won’t you?” she asked anxiously, suddenly afraid that he’d come for a different reason. “You can’t help your sister; she’s gone. You’ll help us, won’t you?” One large tear rolled softly down her face. “I can’t manage any more on my own.”

He clambered over the improvised wall into the makeshift shelter. There was a broken chair on which her mother was sitting. It was supported underneath by bricks that extended out to form a kind of couch. Aunt Eva—Mrs. Kaldy—yellow and petulant, huddled into herself. In the corner on a blanket, very very still, the boy George was lying.

“What’s wrong with the boy?”

“He’s broken his leg. I’ve done the best I could. I tried to set it with splints, the way Papa used to sometimes with the horses—do you remember? But he’s getting worse. He has a fever. I don’t know what else to do.” The eyes huge and a rising note of hysteria in her voice. He knelt down by George and pulled back the coat that was over him. Above the knee and on the shin were two huge, misshapen swellings. Strips of black cloth held a broom handle down the side of the distorted limb.

“How did it happen?”

“He fell and—”

“Fell?” shrieked Mrs. Kaldy. “Fell? He was pushed and beaten by those—those pigs. He behaved like a true man, my poor little boy.” She began to sob. “He saw what those filthy animals were going to do to his mother and sister and behaved like a hero! A hero, I tell you! My poor little boy, poor brave little boy.”

Terez’s face had drained of colour, ugly in distress, eyes huge again, and he looked away.

“Never did I think we would suffer like that. My poor child, my poor daughter, so sheltered—and those filthy Russians! What kind of animals are they? They have destroyed me. Destroyed me, I tell you. What shall we do with ourselves? I ask you, what shall we do?”

One of the bricks supporting the chair became dislodged, mostly because Eva was swaying back and forth in dramatic frenzy. When she felt the chair slip she gave a little shriek and began to moan again.

He could feel Terez beside him, strung taut like a cat, and because he understood he made no effort to look at her or touch her. He examined the leg, then lifted one of George’s eyelids.

“I think you have done everything that could be done for the leg,” he said softly. “But I don’t like the fever. I think he has something wrong with his chest.”

“I tried to get medicine from the Russians.” She stared hard, down at the ground. “One of the officers finally gave me two pills—aspirin, I think.” In the background Mrs. Kaldy was working up to a fresh paroxysm of screams. The screams were interposed with details of what had been done to her by the Russians and what had been done to her child.

He saw Terez shudder, watched something in the eyes blank out and be replaced by an embryonic madness. He put his hands on her shoulders and felt her flinch, then stiffen. “Excuse me one moment, Terez,” he said courteously, and then he crossed to Mrs. Kaldy and slapped her across the face. “Be quiet!” he snapped.

Her jaw dropped open. She stared, then drew breath.

“Please don’t speak or moan any more, Mrs. Kaldy, otherwise I shall be forced to hit you again. We are trying to get you and your son away from here. I have come here to do that. So please help, and if you can’t help, be quiet.”

She gave a further wailing shriek and then turned a face of venom at him. “You’re the same! A peasant! Like the rest of them who raped my daughter and did not even have the grace to leave her mother alone! You’re the same, Janos Marton! I remember you and your father; he was a thief and you’re no better! You think you can have my daughter just as they have had her, and—aaah!” The final shriek was swallowed into a gasp because this time the slap had come from Terez.

“Be quiet, Mama,” she cried. “You’re not helping us! You’re not helping us at all!”

“Mrs. Kaldy,” he said icily, “I came here specifically to look for you and your family. You have suffered, but no worse than many others. I do not intend to take a screaming, insane woman back through the country when it is in its present condition. If you do not behave, remain quiet, and do exactly as you are told, I shall leave you here. It would be far easier for me to leave you here, and I will happily do so.”

Eva stared. She had never spoken to him since he had grown up, only greetings and gracious nods. She stared and was a little afraid because he reminded her of—whom? Adam! He reminded her of Adam when he was cross or unable to be coaxed. He was like Adam, only more so.

“Who are you to speak to me like that?” she asked feebly, but he was sick of her and climbed over the wall away from the ruin. Emotion, emotion. It was no good. For a moment he had wanted to punish that stupid, selfish woman, to show just who he was: the head of the District Committee, a man with papers, power, to whom she must bow and say please and thank you. And it was no good; that kind of emotion was as bad as the other kind, the kind that hurt you because you loved.

“Janos.” Terez touched him lightly on the arm. Thin, frail little face, pleading, humble. “Please ignore her. She’s been spoilt and now it has all gone wrong and she is afraid. She didn’t mean any of those things. She’s just afraid.” She smiled, ashamed. “My mama has no character. Papa tried to tell me, but he loved her too much to admit it openly. She is just a poor, silly creature and she cannot accept what has happened.”

“I understand.” He suddenly wished he had a cigarette, although he had learned—because of the cost—to do without such luxuries. “Are you all right?” he asked, staring over her head at the ruined village.

“Yes.”

“The Russians—”

“I don’t talk about it,” she said quickly. “I want to get home as quickly as possible. You have come across country. How can we get home with George so ill?”

“Can your mother walk?”

“I don’t know.” She sighed and pushed a strand of hair away from her dirty face. “She moans and says she is ill. When she has to go outside she leans on the wall and on me. I don’t know if she can walk.”

How very thin she was! The veins showed in her face too, the way they did in Nicky’s. “Have you any food?” he asked.

“Your sister gave me a sack of beans before she left. Some we have eaten and some I exchanged for other things—the blanket for George. Last week the Russians gave soup away one day.”

He placed his hand gently on her shoulder and this time she did not flinch. “Then first we shall eat, Terez. Do you know how to light a fire?”

“Of course!” Just a glimmer of indignation that made him smile.

“Then light a fire. There’s wood enough I think and, if not, burn your mother’s chair. We shall have hot soup with beans and sausage and bread.” Her eyes widened greedily. “I have a little sausage and bread, and I have an onion for the soup. Then, when we have eaten, I shall tell you about the rest of your family and we shall discuss how to get home.”

He watched Eva Kaldy wolfing down the food, and he decided there was nothing wrong with her and that tomorrow she was going to be made to walk and possibly help carry her son too. She was a small woman but a strong one. Beside her daughter she looked like an amazon and she must be made to help with the journey instead of dragging on Terez. George drank some of the soup and seemed a little better. Terez lifted his head and explained that Janos Marton had come to take them home and George smiled, quite rationally, and said, “Good, good.”

Just as dusk was drawing in three young Russians came sauntering up the road. Terez pressed back against the wall. He took his papers out of his pocket, just in case, and climbed into the road, smiling at them from a long way off. They paused, glared, smiled back in the irrational way he had come to expect from them—rape and violence one day, distributing soup another—and one of them peered over the wall at Terez and said something that made the others stop and look too.

He had learned the merest superficialities of Russian, but with a peasant’s instinct what he had learned was peasant’s talk. He lurched over to Terez and pulled her up against him, arching his body crudely into hers. Then he looked over his shoulders at the Russians and winked, brandished his Party card and bundle of passes, and said, in the obscene guttural of soldiers everywhere, that now it was the turn of loyal Hungarian Party members. A pause—how strange that he was not really afraid at all of these dangerous schoolboys—and then a guffaw, a further volley of obscenities, a good-natured wave, and more shouting as they continued their journey through the village.

“That’s all,” Terez said quietly. “They do that once every night. They won’t return again now. It will be quiet.”

Eva Kaldy, made comatose by the unexpected quantity and quality of the hot soup, had fallen into a deep sleep. George hovered between consciousness and fever, and Janos put the blanket out of his rucksack over the boy.