Iza's Ballad (19 page)

The story of Antal’s father eventually came to the notice of a left-wing newspaper in the capital and the matter was even discussed in parliament. Bérczes’s lawyer turned up again and this time brought a journalist with him, one on a government-supporting paper. He took statements from the old couple and frightened them so much by noting down their stuttering attempts to speak that they left everything to the lawyer, who then reminded them that Dániel Bérczes was not only looking after the aged parents of the unfortunate victim: since the tankardman’s son appeared to be quite intelligent he was also willing to pay for the boy’s education and he could attend the famous grammar school in the nearby city as a boarder.

His grandfather listened and would have preferred some ready cash, while his grandmother just wept, though she tended to weep at anything. She was always frightened something bad would happen and indeed, there was reason enough to fear. She didn’t know what it was but behind the timidity and despair there was something she couldn’t name, a tremor no more tangible or defined than the shadow on the ground of a bird in flight. Antal didn’t want to go. He screamed and protested, being only too happy as a lark, but the tears dried up in his grandmother’s eyes: it was as if a thought had travelled a very long way to flash through her mind and she was the only one privileged to think it. She did something she had never done: she spoke before her husband had a chance to and said that the head of the household could remain as park-keeper and that they did in fact want to send the boy to school, so there was no need to make any complaint against Mr Bérczes, nor did they want anything else of him.

Antal kicked and carried on kicking when they deposited him in the cart. Bérczes’s lawyer drove him into town, though he had to stop twice because the boy leapt off and, like a puppy, made for home. There was no package to accompany him because they didn’t have anything apart from a certificate from his school to say he had done well in his four classes, a certificate that consisted of the teacher at Dorozs reflecting on Antal’s none too visible virtues, since he could barely read or write and had none of the basic school requirements because he attended school for only a couple of weeks in late autumn and late spring, which was when he could afford the time and the shoes. The note omitted to mention Antal’s minimal attendance because if the teacher had done so he would have been in trouble with the authorities.

The institution in which he became a boarder was a five-hundred-year-old Church school to whose governors Dániel Bérczes agreed to supply a vast amount of hot water in lieu of Antal’s fees. In the first two years his teachers thought it a poor bargain because the boy knew next to nothing, was stubborn, rude, got into fights and was nothing like the idyllic image of the gentle, shy peasant lad he should have turned out to be. He hated study and would sneak out through the back door and wander around town – and whenever he saw one of Bérczes’s carts entering the great arched gate with its statues of early Church fathers, Transylvanian princes and paintings of long-dead illustrious bishops, he burst into a stream of foul language that surprised even him, since the boarding school was a veritable paradise compared with Dorozs, and he had put on some weight and grown strong on account of those carts and that steaming water.

Antal spent the first two years of school just making up for what he had missed, but he did grow to like learning. He still waited each day for the Dorozs cart to arrive so he could swear at it, but he wasn’t swearing at the driver or the tankardman, both of whom he greeted with greater respect than he did the masters at school. His classmates never laughed at him for this. Antal had great respect among them because he was an orphan. He swore and fought, responding neither to kindness nor to punishment, which was unexpected in a student whose fees were being paid not in money but in water and whose father had died in such dreadful circumstances. No other half-orphaned pupil could compete with him.

Bérczes took no interest in the child and never sent him a penny. Though the boy was provided with bed, board and tuition he remained alone in the building at Christmas and Easter. The servants all liked him because he was so bored he was ready to help them without being asked and because, when he was alone and the school did not want to keep the heating on just for him, he’d go down to the kitchen to sleep. In the summer holidays he’d hop on any cart that would take him home to Dorozs. At the end of the first year when he turned up with a dreadful report, dressed in the half-city, half-country-style clothes provided by the school, and glared at the strange dog lurking around the bathing area, his grandmother clapped her hands and wondered what to feed him since he had turned into a real giant on school meals. But he hadn’t become a gentleman; he immediately kicked off his shoes, changed his clothes and ran out to the mud in just his pants to carry on with his old job. He brought home whatever he earned and they were genuinely sorry to see him go away again.

He was in his third year of school and aged thirteen when he really developed a taste for learning.

By that time he had caught up with his classmates and, as it turned out, he had an iron will to work and a remarkably good mind. He wasn’t keen on literature, but geography and biology interested him, and he had a fondness for mathematics as well as for languages, which was unusual for the class; in fact, for anything that required logic. This sudden awakening of interest was part of a moment of enlightenment. It was as if a dark curtain had been rent open and he saw his mother, whose face he could barely remember, his father and grandparents, and Dániel Bérczes with his carts, just as they were in life, or might have been. Whenever the pre-ordered water carts from Dorozs arrived during the school’s quiet hour he asked to be allowed to help with the tankard work. It was a dangerous occupation and the young teacher who gave him permission had no idea of the risk involved, thinking it was merely a strange game. Antal’s entire life had centred on the hot spring, and the tankardman and driver both continued to believe that the little boy was rushing downstairs to meet them because the water was calling him, and that he would soon return to pick up where his father had left off – for why should he want to do anything else? Bérczes would surely get bored with his remarkable philanthropy and return the boy to the low station from which he had raised him, so it wouldn’t do him any harm to get used to it now, since it was what he would do till his dying day.

A year later he asked for an appointment with the headmaster.

The headmaster was astonished. It was he who called the students in to see him and it wasn’t his habit to grant them interviews just because they suddenly thought of something. But he knew Antal very well: collegues talked of him with a certain quiet irony at first but he had gained a growing respect. Besides, the school had never had a pupil who paid his fees in water and many of the resident staff were able to relieve their rheumatic limbs because he was there.

The head examined Antal as he entered and saw a thickset fourteen-year-old peasant boy of distinctly protestant look wearing ill-fitting clothes made of cheap but decent material.

Antal Antal, fourth-year student, was requesting that the board of the
gimnázium
give him the opportunity to continue his education by letting him pay his fees either by teaching younger students or through working as a member of the in-school service staff, rather than by having Dániel Bérczes pay them in lieu of a supply of hot spring water.

The head was a classicist, a passionate researcher into antiquity, someone who adored the heroic cast of mind and the high ideal of manliness symbolised by the classical world. His office did not oblige him to teach but out of sheer passion for the subject he taught an annual class or two and solemnly believed that the great figures of Athens and Rome continued to provide the perfect model for the younger generation. Antal was excellent at Latin, his all-consuming mind and his ever readiness to engage in analytical thought helping him to overcome any difficulties in learning the language. ‘A sterling product of our education,’ the headmaster thought. The headmaster saw the Capitol rise before him, the seven hills, and the never seen yet a thousand times imagined face of Romulus. Meanwhile the boy was seeing the body of his father with shredded muscles hanging off his arm. The name Dorozs, the place of hot springs, was fundamentally non-Latin but had its origins in the languages of the Danube basin, languages the headmaster couldn’t identify. Antal had no idea why the headmaster seemed to be moved, but he felt his request was being warmly received and that made him happy.

The head thought of the director of the newly opened school in the next street and felt a certain pity for him that he could have no such experience. He stood up, patted the round head before him, quoted something from Horace and promised to have a word with Mr Bérczes, and that he would argue the boy’s case before the board of governors. The child clicked his heels as his teachers had taught him. The headmaster felt moved as Antal left: the boy was a miniature
civis Romanus
.

As soon as he was outside the door Antal said something truly terrible about Mr Bérczes, the kind of thing his father was screaming on his deathbed, then leaned against the iron railings that ran alongside the wooden steps in exactly the same way as they had done a good century and a half ago when the school was first rebuilt after the fire, and kissed it as though it were a living creature with a mouth.

The head walked up and down his room, still in a state of high emotion, vowing to look after Antal’s interests as long as he himself was alive. The head misunderstood the boy in regarding him purely as the product of his liberal but highly puritan education, or indeed as the embodiment of his own classical ideals with the result that when he died, during Antal’s university years, he died not quite knowing who it was he had been teaching.

Bérczes was absolutely delighted not to have to think about Antal any more; the tankardman’s accident had long been forgotten in Budapest and, being a businessman, he preferred to sell his water for a price. The
gimnázium
board was happy to see Antal through as many scholarships as necessary to top up his paid work.
‘Sub pondere crescit palma,’
thought the head, who had been referred to as Cato ever since his student days at the school, as he watched the boy set out for his daily job, showing his special exeat at the door. Antal made a great impression on all his classmates, he hung on to his free tuition right through to matriculation while in receipt of a regular supply of underwear from the Women’s Voluntary Corps. He no longer went home for the summer, the head assigning him to teach a class of failing students from the countryside, the sons of landowners and village registrars, so that when he arrived home in autumn he looked tanned and strong, every student of his having passed the repeat examinations. Mothers didn’t like him because when one of his students didn’t want to learn and would not be persuaded he would beat the boy, beating him without anger, with all the detachment of a doctor administering nasty medicine for the greater good of the patient.

He could never afford books: they lay beyond the limits of his working salary. Newspapers, on the other hand, were affordable. Papers cost a few farthings and one could learn a great deal from them, particularly about politics. The head walked into the dormitory one bright day just as he was lost in the news, reading the foreign correspondent’s report with great care.

The head didn’t like his students reading newspapers.

His school was not of the old hidebound kind but a relatively free-thinking institution whose broad views sometimes featured too prominently, as a result of which it received far less state support than it might have done had it been less liberal. At one time it had suffered considerable trouble with the authorities and the headmaster’s immediate predecessor had been sacked in 1920. This head was more cautious in his approach to progress and was terrified that this boy, whom he had liked so much, might be taking the first steps down a dangerous road.

Antal defended his hunger for knowledge and choice of reading with perfectly reasonable arguments and wouldn’t relent even when the head extended to him the same rights in using materials from the great and famous library as the masters enjoyed. Antal replied that the great library was chiefly for classical literature and he’d also like to read living authors writing about modern things.

He’s young, of course, thought Cato, only sixteen. Maybe he wants to read some of those contemporary love poems, verses so obscure that no one can understand them, the writers themselves being snotty brats, people who read with their nerves rather than their brains. But the boy wants his own library and that is a worthy ambition. He thought of the infinitely many scrolls of Cicero at the bottom of the
scrinium
and of Cicero’s freedman, Tiro. Yes, it was a fine ambition and a pity to stand in the boy’s way. The Mitasi lad is already chasing skirt and smoking cigarettes. This one wants books, so let him have the books. What time did Vince Szo
̋
cs tend to call in?

He knew the judge, they had been fellow students in this very school, it was just that Szo
̋
cs had studied law afterwards whereas he trained as a teacher. Szo
̋
cs was a quiet little chap, someone who was not too keen on Latin but did well enough on Roman Law at university. It was, again, one of the teachers who had taken him under his wing, the boy being an orphan. Once he qualified he became a clerk at court while the head started as an assistant master. One day, around Christmas, he appeared at school, swinging his walking stick, running up the wooden stairs, having returned because he liked the school, even the smell of it. From then on, until he was dismissed from his position, he always tried to drop in when passing, or to call on the head at the boarding house so he could take a look around. He was a loyal son of the school, always willing to donate something, a little shyly, whenever an unusually gifted student needed help. He said he didn’t have a father himself and that others had brought him up, and that though he couldn’t afford very much he would like to give a little something every Christmas as a present for the kind of penniless child he used to be. There was always an envelope in his hand that he would leave on the table before rushing off. Then the round little man would be gone before he could be called back.