The Europe That Was (9 page)

THE PICKET LINES OF
MARTON HEVESSY

My dear Joe:

It's good to hear that at least one government has had the sense to put a round peg in a round hole, and that some small part of the security of the United States is in your hands. And thanks for kind words. My memory is that we learned from you, not you from us. But that we should both have this impression is probably what Eisenhower wanted.

So Marton Hevessy has given me as a reference. I have no reason to believe that he was ever a communist. I must confess, however, that his father always said he would end in jail. He used to say it lovingly, if you see what I mean, for he was very proud of Marton; but he was afraid, like any other father, lest his son's nonconformity should draw upon him the resentment of the herd.

First, here is a solid fact to reassure you. In old days any Budapest bank would have given Marton Hevessy a tiptop reference. From a banker's point of view—I'll come to mine later—he was an honourable, enterprising commercial man who had built up his own business from nothing. Industrial design, it was. If you invented an ingenious electric shoe cleaner, for example, you called on Hevessy to give it the form which would most appeal to the public—though once in a while he would turn out a design so preposterously imperial that it would have won a gold medal at the Exhibition of 1851. That was the aristocrat in him; he considered it his duty to set standards, not to accept them. The Hevessys are a very ancient family, and Marton cannot help looking like one of his ancestors. I don't suppose that so much tall, audacious elegance has ever been to him anything but a handicap.

What do you know of Marton Hevessy?
Joe, it's like a question set in an examination paper. State shortly what you know of Don Quixote.

I can guess what sort of answer you want: some little definite sentence which will enable you to stand up as a supporter of the traditional liberalism of the last hundred years. I wish I could slap it down on your desk; but I am not in the confidence of the Almighty. I cannot imagine Marton—so rounded, so passionate a European—as a contented American unless one of his unpredictable loyalties were
engaged. I think it has been, but that is for you to judge. None of his friends could ever foretell how he would react to any new landscape of humanity, though we had absolute faith that the personal expression of his emotions—when, as it were, complete, varnished and framed—would be just as satisfying as his notorious gesture in defence of Sarita's religion.

You've met Sarita Hevessy, of course. I am certain that it was she, not he (for the one time he never appealed to his friends was when he was in trouble), who told you to refer to me. I can imagine her facing you across the files on the table, all fragrant with common sense and her very great love of her husband. You refused to be impressed by all that beauty, didn't you? You kept a professional poker face, and reserved judgement. But your first impression was right. She's gold from the heart outwards.

Sarita! So un-Hungarian a name may have made you uneasy. Her family were Sephardic Jews, who chose to remain behind at Budapest when the Turks retreated. Reverence for their religion sat pretty lightly on her and her family. They were refreshing and agreeable citizens of the capital. And Budapest was an Eden, you remember, where nobody bothered, until Nazi and Zionist had coiled themselves around the Tree of Knowledge, how host or guest elected to walk with God. If Marton had married Sarita five years earlier than he did, she would merely have mentioned—between casual drinks, perhaps—that she supposed she was a Jewess if she was anything, and left it at that.

In 1938, however, there was a tough crowd round the Tree of Knowledge. They ate the apples and threw at each other those they couldn't digest. Marton despised the lot of them, and took action. He wasn't a man to address a public meeting or write a letter to the press; his revolt was personal. He told Sarita that before he could allow her to honour him with her hand in marriage he would become a Jew.

Sarita protested. She was a most capable and tolerant child, and she tried to laugh Marton out of this misplaced loyalty. Still, she was Magyar all through—for her family had loved and lived and drunk their wine and ridden their horses on Danube banks for five hundred years—and as a Magyar she couldn't help being impressed by irresistible extravagance of gesture on the part of her lover. Marton had put himself in the class of those Hungarian magnates who ordered from Nice a special train of flowers merely to pave the courtyard for the entrance of a bride, or built a Cinderella's glass coach that she might be carried to a single birthday picnic in the forest.

She wasn't conceited. She didn't think that she was worth such fantasies. She never suspected that any good citizen of Budapest would have been ashamed of his ignorance if he couldn't tell to a visiting provincial the name of that golden arrow flighting down the Corso, with
the chestnut hair and the velvety warm skin of Magyar horse and woman. No, it wasn't any sense of her own value that made her give way to Marton's insistence. It was just the glowing unnecessariness of any such sacrifice at all.

The Hevessy marriage was near perfect—as soon as Sarita had managed to stop her husband's sober visits to the synagogue, which were embarrassing to everyone but himself. She didn't prohibit, of course. She just knew how long Marton needed to tire of any of his exciting perversities. Moral for a policeman, Joe!

On which side did he fight? But what a question! Hasn't Sarita told you that he is the most loyal man she ever met, that the key to his whole character is loyalty? He's a Hevessy and a patriot, and of course he fought for Hungary against the hereditary enemy. Marton went off to war with Russia as a dashing captain of cavalry. A little elderly for the part, perhaps, but for youth he substituted enthusiasm—or as much of it as his hatred of Hitler allowed.

Ah, but what happened to Sarita, you'll ask. Isn't it easy to account for Marton's communist sympathies? Didn't the coming of the Russians save her from an extermination camp? No, it didn't. Even the most rabid Hungarian Nazis would have thought it ridiculous to pester Hevessys, however they might describe their religion on a government form.

What do you know of Marton Hevessy?
Well, I can answer for him in the post-war years. Siege, slaughter and Russian occupation looted from him everything movable, including, we thought, his romanticism. Just to feed his wife and children and remake his business were tasks of knight-errantry valiant enough even for him. He succeeded, and he was content. He wasn't a worker to be bullied, or a capitalist to be ruined. He was a specialist; and whether he designed for private clients or for the State, his living was secure. Sarita was a little sad. She found herself married to a sober, tranquil professional of industry. He even used to spend free evenings with his lawyers.

I am surprised that these unusual absences did not worry her, especially since he avoided all discussion. Still, his character appeared to have changed. She might easily have thought him obsessed, like any other solid citizen in his middle forties, by some dull and technical affair such as patent rights. And lawyers are indestructible; they continue to function under the milder forms of communism so long as there is any private property left in the deed boxes.

No, there was nothing to arouse a wife's suspicion until Marton began to take an interest in history. History, he insisted, would judge their period as one of necessary but too drastic reforms. It was the duty of a loyal citizen not to allow all the links with the, past to vanish. For example, the Hungarian Nobility should not be
forgotten. Whatever its sins in the past, it might again—in a hundred years perhaps—be needed.

I expect that at first Sarita merely listened from one tolerant little ear, and received these magnificent lectures with a proper pleasure that her husband was enjoying his dinner. It was hardly tactful to point out that in the ten years of their marriage she had never heard Marton allow to the hereditary nobility any value whatever.

He held his great-grandfather to be disgracefully typical of the whole class. Great-grandfather had lost every cent of the Hevessy money at cards, and was left with nothing but an entailed estate which he couldn't sell. He returned his estate and barony to the Emperor with a request—and a model it was of dignified Hungarian prose—that his Imperial and Royal Majesty should be pleased to pay the Hevessy debts and save the Hevessy honour. He then dressed himself in full regalia and galloped his favourite hunter over a cliff, with the reins—so far as
rigor mortis
permitted an opinion—still lightly grasped in his left hand. It was a death in style which should have appealed to Marton, but did not.

So when Marton's sudden passion for aristocracy grew and flourished before as well as after dinner, Sarita at last took it very seriously and connected it, quite rightly, with the mysterious visits to his lawyers. She couldn't help assuming that her disappointingly sober husband was engaged in some crazy plot to restore the old régime and—though no doubt preserving the motherly smile on her delicious face—she panicked. She began, all unknown to Marton, the long series of intrigues and letters and pullings of gossamer wire by invisible hands, which were to take the Hevessy family out of Hungary and into your office files, Joe. She should have remembered that Marton's revolts were always personal and unlikely to draw upon him the wrath of governments—even communist governments—but her haste was forgivable. Of every four men she had known in 1939, at least one must have been killed by politics. That omits, of course, those who were killed by war.

While Sarita was worrying herself sick over State trials and searching the papers for news of any arrests which could possibly lead to her own circle, Marton, I have no doubt, preserved an exasperating complacence—until one evening, in the midst of a terrifying week of militant communism on the march, he came home from the office and kissed Sarita's hand with gay, exaggerated deference and addressed her as Baroness Hevessy.

She was. That was his business with the lawyers. He had been proving to the satisfaction of the High Court that great-grandfather, when he so flamboyantly paid his debts, had a son two years old, the existence of whom, in all that dignified excitement, he had omitted to mention to the Emperor. Consequently the Imperial and Royal action was
void. The entail could not be broken. The barony could not revert to the Crown.

There was nothing at all that Sarita could do about it. The case was simple and, for the courts, a joyous holiday from legalizing the dictates of dictators. The lawyers had all gone to work with immense professional zest to settle a claim that was satisfyingly constitutional and wholly useless. Beyond a shadow of doubt Marton and Sarita were Baron and Baroness Hevessy.

Their friends—and believe me, Joe, every one of them will be grateful to you for giving him the chance to speak—were as delighted with Marton as at his solemn circumcision. I am told that even hardened communists took a careful look round and laughed. There is still a wry sense of fun in Budapest.

I can hear you remarking sternly that he doesn't call himself Baron Hevessy. But of course he doesn't! The title was only for use in reddest Hungary. It was his personal protest. He wouldn't dream of using it in a country where it might be of some use to him.

I don't know how Sarita got him to leave his (in spite of everything) beloved country when her schemes came to fruition. My personal opinion is that the government unofficially expelled him. He was too well known in low cafés and high, and his exquisite, unpunishable gestures might have started a fashion. However that may be, there they are in your hands—Sarita, Marton and the children.

He had a good job in America, too, you say regretfully. It must have been, if his employers bothered to make him declare whether he had ever been a communist or not. And so he refused to answer, did he? And Sarita refused to answer for him. God, there's loyalty for you!

Well now, Joe, I admit these questions have to be asked, for one can't run a great country with gloves on. But at the same time I know what the effect would be on myself if I were asked to declare my politics as a condition of employment. I should answer like a wide-eyed sheep, and be ashamed of myself afterwards for not having had the guts to tell the questioner to go to hell.

But then, I am not a citizen in the magnificant class of Marton Hevessy. Nothing on earth would induce me to become a Jew in a swarm of Nazis, or to provoke confession-forcing commissars by creating myself a baron, or to pass myself off as a possible communist in the America of 1951. What courage the man has for doing the right thing at the wrong time—the wrong time for his own personal benefit, that is.

Joe, what do
you
know of Marton Hevessy?

ROLL OUT THE BARREL

Margit was an island like the rest of us. In the set of complicated currents she kept her shores intact only by loyalty to what was best in herself. She had not much else to be loyal to.

She was a Hungarian peasant who had earned her lonely living as a servant in Budapest ever since she was fourteen years old. Social democracy and a husband with a bit of land—those were her desires, political and personal. Towards the present régime she was dully neutral, for it snatched away with one hand what it gave with the other.

She took pride in her skill, and as much in her employers as they permitted. For the last six months she had worked for a middle-aged consulting engineer, respectable and law-abiding. He seldom laughed, and his ready smile seemed to spring from a natural courtesy rather than any personal interest. He left no doubt, however, that he appreciated her cooking, and that was enough for Margit.

She used to day-dream—failing a better subject—that he had asked her to be his wife, though any woman could see that he was dedicated to something, perhaps the memory of a former love, more distant than marriage. The dream never lasted longer than the washing-up of two plates and a coffee cup.

Margit knew very well that she hadn't the beauty to revive a dead heart. All her mirror told her was that she was squat and thick and brown; it could not reveal that her eyes were gay and that she moved with light feet and a provocative swing of the skirt. That touch of gallantry had been born of the czardas danced in the village of her girlhood, and was kept alive by the barrel of excellent wine in the kitchen.

The barrel was a present from her brother, who had inherited the little family vineyard and contrived to hold back enough of the harvest to supply himself and her. The rest went to the State cellars for export. Margit was puzzled that wine should have become so scarce and expensive. In the days before the war a generous employer would no more have thought of reckoning up what was drunk in the kitchen than of counting the potatoes.

So Margit treasured her hundred-litre barrel. She wasn't a heavy drinker. At the moderate rate of a big glass for lunch and another for supper, there was only enough to keep her morale more gay than grim
for about two hundred days. The barrel, too, was a symbol. It brought into the worried city a sense of solidarity with her village—a spiritual rather than political class-consciousness. She felt for her hundred litres the welcome that a business woman would give to a hamper of flowers from the garden of her first lover.

Some of her treasure, of course, she had to share; but that, too, was joy. She was enabled to be gracious and to indulge the aristocrat that lived in her peasant heart. So, when she received a visit from the well-dressed gentleman who had recently begun to sit outside the café at the corner, it was hospitality rather than fear which made her draw a jug for him.

She knew what he was. Among the humble there was unspoken alliance for the recognition of secret police. The porter of the block, who that very day had been ordered by the well-dressed gentleman to give him a weekly bulletin of information, had dutifully kept the secret, but handed out broad hints to chosen friends.

The policeman in Margit's kitchen was a very superior specimen of the breed—not at all the type which normally collected information from porters. She greeted him with the politeness reserved for a class above her own, and hovered hospitably over him.

‘Good wine, this!' exclaimed the gentleman from the café at the corner, stretching his legs under the table. ‘Is your employer rich?'

‘My brother sent it me,' she replied. ‘It has nothing to do with the master.'

‘And what does he drink himself over there?'—the visitor jerked a thumb towards the narrow passage which led, through a faintly delicious atmosphere of spices and onions, to the office and dining-room of Margit's consulting engineer.

‘Whatever he can get, sir.'

‘And plenty of it, eh?'

The visitor, determined to be a democrat, pinched her playfully. Margit's reception of the compliment was cold. She knew from experience that her rotundities were eminently pinchable, and she did not—for example, with the porter—take offence. But the caress of her visitor was incorrect; he made it appear a studied gesture rather than an irresistible temptation.

Margit dropped her best manner and answered him with a rough frankness. That was one good thing about the present régime. You needn't—if you belonged to the proletariat—bother with ceremony when you didn't feel inclined.

‘How can anyone get plenty of it?'

‘Complaining of the régime, are you?'

‘Listen, I'm a peasant! Better off, worse off? I don't know. Wait and see—that's what we say.'

‘What about the visitors here? Is that what they say?'

‘Do you think I've nothing to do, cocky, but crawl up the passage and listen at the door?'

The visitor gave a hoarse chuckle, into which Margit's wine and pleasant, broad accent had injected some sincerity. ‘We come from the same district,' he exclaimed. ‘I see that!'

‘Every district has some black pigs among the white.'

‘That's the end, sweetheart,' he said—quite tolerantly, but as if the inevitable time had come to exchange good-fellowship for his normal business attitude. ‘Sit down!'

Resignedly she sat down opposite him at the kitchen table. He represented the limitless power of the State. There was no need for him to explain or threaten, and they both knew it. He drew from his pocket three photographs of the same man: full face, right profile, and left profile.

‘Have you ever seen that one?' he asked her.

‘No.'

‘Have you ever heard the name of Istvan Sarvary?'

‘No. Who's he?'

‘An enemy of our country, my girl. A revolutionary and warmonger. And at last I'm on his track. Look at those photos, and take your time.'

Margit obeyed. The police photographs were clear, glossy prints, upon which every detail could be seen. The subject looked like an unwashed criminal, hollow-cheeked, sneering and obstinate. She did not recognize the face. Then, in the left profile, she noticed the man's glasses. They were round, old-fashioned, and of heavy tortoise-shell, and there was a home-made repair just in front of the left ear, where the rivet or binding had been wrapped in some soft substance to prevent rubbing.

A possible identity for Sarvary at once occurred to her. Yet it was so unlikely that there was no sudden start of recognition in her eyes or mouth for the trained interrogator across the table to leap upon.

‘You are interested?' he suggested.

‘You told me to take a long look.'

‘And what do you see?'

What she saw in the eye of the mind was a drawer in the consulting engineer's dressing-table, and a pair of old glasses with the left bar wrapped round by a neatly sewn strip of wash-leather. Could they be the same glasses? Was it possible for a haggard, clean-shaven man with dark, wavy hair to turn into her employer with his well-rounded cheeks, his straight white hair greased firmly back, and his white luxuriant moustache which looked as if it had been over his mouth for the last thirty years?

Then there was his nose. The man in the photograph had a strong, fleshy nose, quite ordinary. Her employer had a Roman nose with a
marked and distinguished hump on its bridge. The shape of it, she remembered—almost with a giggle—seemed to change in hot weather. No, of course it was unthinkable. Her kind master could not be a man wanted by the police, a barbarian trying to bring about another war.

‘I've seen someone like him,' she said at last.

She couldn't tell how much her face had given away. Something, yes. The keen peasant game of buying and selling was in her blood. She knew, from the parallel of the market-place, that her hesitation had been too long and that she must explain it.

‘Who?'

‘The new notary of our village.'

‘They have a queer breed in your village,' he remarked contemptuously. ‘Stop fooling, girl! When did this man come to see your employer?'

‘Never.'

‘Then what was he doing—the person whom you thought the photograph resembled?'

‘Our notary? He makes too much money at home to come to Budapest.'

The visitor rose from the table and brutally dominated her eyes.

‘If you hurt me, I'll scream,' she threatened. ‘They know I'm respectable here.'

‘Hurt you? My dear, we don't do that sort of thing. I'm just going to give you time to remember.'

The gentleman from the corner café strolled impassively across the kitchen and turned on the tap of the barrel. The thin, fast stream of wine hit the tiles with a neat splash.

Margit shrieked, and leaped for the tap rather than for him. At once she made brutal contact with her chair again, arms bruised, bewildered by the dexterity with which she had been flung back.

‘We like wine in our district, don't we?' he said. ‘Barrel full?'

‘Yes. Yes, sir,' she begged. ‘Nearly full.'

‘Then it will take about ten minutes to empty it. Plenty of time to talk.'

The purple and pink foam that had jumped from the kitchen tiles subsided, and the lake of wine deepened and spread.

‘Please, sir! Please!'

‘But, I shall be delighted to turn it off when you've told the truth. A pity for such good wine to be wasted! I should say your brother's is a rather stony soil facing south,' he replied, talking with an exasperating slowness.

‘It didn't remind me of the notary. I swear it,' she sobbed, the big tears richocheting off her apron into wine.

‘Ah? Of whom, then?'

‘Nobody. I was impertinent. I've never seen the face before.'

‘And the name Istvan Sarvary? Have you never heard it? Or overheard it, perhaps? Think now! That's a generous tap you have there.'

‘No, never! Never, sir! I've never heard of it.'

The words were loud and incoherent with grief. The lake of wine found out an imperceptible slope and began to run towards the passage. At the door it deepened to a quarter of an inch, and the colour changed from a pink transparency to black with red reflections.

‘He might have come here without you knowing it?'

‘Yes, yes, of course he might,' she answered eagerly.

‘You're not sure that you haven't seen him, then?'

‘No. How could I be sure?'

‘Then we have only to take a little step further. Look! I'm just going to shut off the tap. Tell me when it was he might have come here—that's all I want to know.'

Margit was utterly muddled. What he invited her to say sounded so reasonable. Why on earth was she letting her wine run away when she had only to tell him a date, a movement, her crazy suspicion, anything? Yet—she didn't tell lies.

She opened her mouth and nothing would come. All the inhibition of the Christian Europe that had made her stood in the way. Had she been asked outright whether her employer could be Istvan Sarvary she might have answered that at least she had wondered. Might have. But there again, standing at the gate, was all the loyalty of a feudal system that had vanished and left nothing but its good behind.

‘I can't tell you. I don't know.'

The interrogator kept the barrel running.

‘Won't little one, not can't! Won't, you mean.'

She heard the front door open and shut as her employer came home.

‘Good heavens, what's all this?' he exclaimed.

He bounded up the passage on the track of the wine, and caught the visitor with his hand still on the tap.

‘Margit, your wine! What's all this?'

Margit's face was bedabbled with tears. The gentleman looked confused and guilty.

‘Tap leaking?' the consulting engineer asked.

‘He turned it on,' she sobbed.

‘Friend of yours?'

‘No, no, no!'

‘Well, then—ah, I think I understand! But, my dear sir, if you had anything to ask, why didn't you come to see me? I know everyone in the building and my reputation is sound, I hope. No good telling you I'm a party member—too old, for one thing. But what I always say is, they're doing fine work for Hungary. Example to all Europe, eh?
We're both patriots, aren't we? Well, there's the bond. Now you put me through the hoops in any way you like.'

Her master was so friendly and natural that Margit at once put out of mind that imagined identity. After all, there was more than one pair of mended spectacles in the world. And then his nose! You couldn't alter a nose that God had made.

‘What do
you
know of Istvan Sarvary?' the visitor shot straight at him.

‘Sarvary? Why I thought he was abroad. Don't tell me the swine has managed to get back to Budapest?'

‘He was a friend of yours, was he?'

‘No, he wasn't. Far from it! But you've come to the right shop, my dear sir. I'll answer all your questions. We can't have men like Istvan Sarvary about. Margit, there's nothing to drink in the house. May we borrow what's left in the barrel? I'll make it up to you. We'll try to get something as good as yours.'

‘You're generous,' the gentleman sneered suspiciously.

‘You think so? I'll tell you how it is. I don't want the State to show pity. Try the dogs, shoot them, exile them, put them to work! They're expendable, aren't they? But a little woman like this—well when she gets in the way, the State can't help it and mustn't show pity. Never! But chaps like you and me are free to do what we can. That's what I say.'

Margit didn't agree at all with this view of the State, but she assumed it was politics and over her head. If a man with a good heart accepted cruelty, it meant nothing and was just words.

The man from the corner café took Margit's employer a little aside, and warned him of something in a low voice.

‘She? Oh, I don't think she could have seen him. But you never know. Well, if there's anything at all, you'll get it out of her. Better methods than wine taps, eh?