They Were Found Wanting (41 page)

By the same post came a letter from Honey Andras Zutor. He wrote without punctuation, but his meaning was utterly clear. He told the same story, but with certain additions:

Balint was not at all sorry. As it turned out it was a lucky chance that the operation had still proved fruitless even after he had accepted the notary’s offer of help. Although they were quite within the law to ask for the gendarmes the fact that Simo had himself offered them showed that the notary found himself under an obligation to someone, and by playing this double game and making sure that the trick did not come off he was clearly
repaying
a debt and was now free of it. But in doing so it was he himself who broke the thin thread of any confidence Abady might still have had in him.

I wonder why he did it, mused Balint. Why should he betray the plan he himself had suggested?

There were several possibilities. The offer of help might have been made simply to curry favour with the powerful landowner; Simo was quite adept at this as Balint had seen when he was
setting
up the co-operative in the mountains. But any display of goodwill coming from him was sure to be false; he hated Abady’s strict management of the forests where the new order had put an end to the illicit deer shoots that he had had with the old and now retired manager Nyiresy. When that old rogue had still been the Abady forest manager they had lived like lords themselves, organizing wild festivities, getting free wood for themselves and others, while ignoring all restraints of law and order. Now Abady had put an end to his life as a little tin god in the mountains and he couldn’t forgive him. Of course there were probably other
reasons
too, more serious ones that he hardly dared speak of. No doubt, after the shooting and other incidents he was frightened that the mountain people would try to take their revenge on him for helping the money-lenders and the foreclosures. Perhaps, as the whole village was involved in the matter of the illegal grazing, he had felt it wiser to prove he wasn’t totally against them and perhaps felt he would breathe more easily as he went about his business if he did them a good turn for once.

This at least was Abady’s train of thought. Still, he realized that he had not yet found the answer to the cattle problem. Something else would have to be tried. Perhaps he could go straight to the Prefect of the district and get gendarmes from somewhere not under Simo’s jurisdiction. Maybe that would be the answer …

T
HE CHURCH BELLS
had already started their second peel when Countess Roza and her son walked out from the shade of the north-west tower of the castle of Denestornya and started the short descent which led to the village church. As long as Balint could remember the bells that signalled the time for going to church had always sounded the same. It was that same sound that pealed forth when he had been a child, a schoolboy home from the holidays from the Theresianum, or a young man on leave from his diplomatic posts abroad.

This weekly attendance at church had become something of a pilgrimage for Countess Roza. She too remembered the familiar sound of the bells from her own childhood when, the spoilt
princess
of an enchanted domain, she had demurely walked down the same path firstly with her parents, later with her husband, and then for so many widowed years, alone or just with a servant in attendance. And it had been just the same for generations of Abadys before her. The path was paved with ancient pebbles. Every now and then there was a short flight of stone steps, and these were now deeply worn even though it was only folk from the castle who used the path which led to the small door of the cemetery. This was always kept locked, and only they had the key.

The family never drove to church, no matter how bad the weather. This would have meant a long detour from the castle courtyard, through the home farm and back through the village until eventually they reached the rococo gateway where stood three graceful statues of angels, one holding the Ten
Commandments
, the second the Abady coat of arms, and the third leaning elegantly on a long trumpet patiently awaiting the order to sound the Last Trump.

Anyhow, whatever the reason, Countess Abady, who was determined that all the members of her household should also attend church on Sunday, never ordered the carriage on this day.

Abady stopped for a moment on the edge of the narrow path. He loved to look out from there. Though the gentle hillside was covered with a thick plantation of young pine trees, from this place there was a gap through which one could look out over the rich Keresztes plains towards the distant Torda mountains. Even further off could just be seen the hazy blue outlines of the high ridges of the Jara, while close at hand the sunlight picked out the stone fáade of the old church. Just behind it, half hidden by groups of lime trees and elms, Balint could see the red roofs of the old mansion where his grandfather, Count Peter, had lived; and it was the memories that were brought back by this glimpse that had such an effect today on Balint’s imagination.

As a boy Balint had often escaped from his tutors and stolen over to visit his grandfather. At that time the pines had still been quite small and Balint would pick his way through their thickly enlaced branches pretending that he was Cooper’s ‘Leather Jerkin’. When he climbed the cemetery wall he would imagine it to be the palisades of a great fort. By the time he had also scaled the wall of his grandfather’s mansion he was often in a thoroughly bedraggled state with torn trousers and filthy stockings. Thinking about it today he could still see the old gentleman,
himself
the soul of neatness, with a smile on his carefully shaven face and his small pointed moustaches waxed to a fine point, turning in welcome as Balint climbed wearily up to the porticoed terrace.

After Count Peter’s death Balint’s mother had allowed her agent Azbej to install himself in a few of the rooms and Balint managed to avoid going there as he did not wish to be angered by whatever horrors the common little lawyer might have
perpetrated
. Perhaps he had even repainted some of the
eighteenth-century
rooms in garish colours, and Balint did not want to be pained by the sacrilege to his grandfather’s memory.

Recollecting himself he hurried after his mother who was now some way ahead.

The church gave the impression of being completely white, both inside and out. The interior walls had been lime-washed and even the ancient benches were as white as constant scrubbing for
several
centuries could achieve. The floor was covered with great slabs of white limestone. The organ was painted pale grey with its elaborate decorations picked out in faded gilt and the baldachino and the pulpit were of pale carved stone. The ceiling too was painted, each square panel with a different pattern of either
flowers
or heraldic emblems. These, however, were all so faded that the general impression was one of radiant whiteness, so much so that one hardly noticed that on the ceiling there were tulips and carnations and that here a white hart was drinking from a
colourless
mountain stream and there an oddly-shaped pelican was feeding its young with its own blood.

In the congregation many of the men seemed to be dressed in white too, so snowy were their best linen shirts. Contrasted with them were the principal men of the village – the estate manager, the local sheriff and leading tradespeople and the treasurer of Balint’s new co-operative society. These people, all in dark clothes, sat in the front rows. Black predominated also in the women’s pews for though some of the young women and girls wore multi-coloured head-scarves the older ones who sat in front of them were swathed in black from head to foot. High on the wall behind the choir rail was the tablet showing the numbers of the hymns and psalms to be sung, and this too was painted black. However the most sombre of them all was the priest himself whose voluminous robes were of the darkest hue imaginable, and the old priest himself, as he leaned forward – with his long beak of a nose – over the edge of the pulpit, resembled nothing as much as an old crow in a tree.

Directly beneath him was the place reserved for the Abady family. Here the benches were also of scrubbed white pine but the book-rest was covered in the same light-green velvet as were the cushions of the pulpit. A Book of Psalms and a Bible were always placed on this rest. Directly behind it sat Balint and his mother. Here the benches formed, with the altar-table, an almost perfect square, the men in front and the girls at one side. The altar was covered with an embroidered cloth, as it always was for the Sunday services, but today, as it was the Feast of the New Bread and there was going to be Holy Communion, it carried also the silver vessels of the Denestornya church plate bearing the bread and wine, and these in their turn were covered by an ancient altar cloth of faded brocade, though the shape of the objects beneath could clearly be distinguished.

The first psalm had come to an end and the organ was playing softly. The girls, who until now had clustered together at the entrance to the church, tiptoed forward in single file, hurrying and jostling each other until they had found their places and could kneel for a few moments in prayer. Then they sat up, silently sniffing at the fine lawn handkerchiefs or bunches of rosemary they held in their hands. This was exactly as it always happened for it was an unwritten law that the men of the village should take their places first, followed by the important
tradespeople
and the village elders. Then came the women and boys who went to their seats in the choir beneath the organ and only when all the others were in their places could the unmarried girls take their places too.

Now the organ boomed out a hymn-tune. The priest intoned and then the whole congregation rose and sang together. Balint at once noticed how rough some of the voices seemed, even to the point of singing wildly out of tune – but there was no mistaking the deep faith and the eagerness and the sincerity with which they sang. It must have been like this with the early Christians when the Message was still new.

After the prayers the vicar read the passage from the Bible that was to be the text on which he based his sermon.

He was an old man with an old man’s quavering voice and he lingered long over the first syllable of each word. Everything he said Balint had heard before, and the rest of the congregation many times more than he; but it was all for the best, for the simple folk of the village understood it better than if they were hearing something new and so took it more to heart. And the text too was familiar because it was always the same. It was the Parable of the Sower and the Seed, and the sermon itself dealt with the seed which fell on good ground and brought forth fruit an hundredfold.

The sun’s rays lit up the interior of the church, catching here some small particles of dust which seemed to dance lightly in the still air, and there the bright colours in a girl’s head-scarf, the
silver
in the greying hair of one elderly villager or the flaming
copper
-coloured cheek-bones of another. The sparkle in the air was almost vaporous, so much so that the fine white of the church walls might have been covered with a layer of fine cream.

In some places, where the annual whitewashing – that ritual to ensure that the church interior was always immaculate – had been repeated for several hundred years, the lime wash was
sometimes
nearly three fingers deep and smoothed and softened every hard edge or angle of the vaulting, the groins and the projecting capitals of the columns.

To Balint the old church had never seemed so beautiful.

He looked around, as he had so many times before. On one side the three arches which began where the organ had been placed high up on a stone balcony were supported firmly by
columns
of Byzantine solidity. On the other, high above the girls’ benches, the last arch was joined to the stone balustrade which guarded the door of the Tabernacle and the
Porta
Triumphalis.
Opening behind the pulpit these doors dated from the time when the church, then of course the home of Catholic rites, had been built in the twelfth century. Naturally no papers still existed to prove the age of the building, but its origins were nonetheless unmistakable.

This was one of the early churches constructed with two rather than three aisles. One, the most important, was the nave in the style typical of the times of Bela III and unique to Hungary. Here, in the apse and the transept, the columns and arches all dated from the original construction. The rest of the church had seen many changes. A good part had been burnt at the time of the Tartar invasions when much of the building had been destroyed – except for the dressed stone exterior walls – and had had to be rebuilt; and this was why the old main entrance on the west side was walled up while another door had been opened beside it. The pew door was surrounded with gothic arches similar to those in the rebuilt nave.

Later came the Reformation when, because the sermon was the most important part of the Reformed service of prayers, the pulpit became the principal feature of the church interior. So as not to obscure the altar this was place at the side, just where the transept began. Its elaborate carved stone decoration was in High Renaissance style.

Soon taste changed again and so the new baldachino and the organ casing were carved in flamboyant rococo.