Anna Edes

by Dezso Kosztolányi

  ‘What did you take away?’ the commissioner continued his interrogation. ‘Be a good girl and tell us. Where have you hidden it? It would be better for you, dear, if you told us. We’ll find out in the end anyway.’

  He ordered her to be searched.

  ‘Raise your hands,’ barked the policeman. Anna clumsily raised her two arms, her elbows slightly bent.

  ‘Straighten them out,’ said the policeman.

  So she held them straighter and for a second the young murderess reminded them of some ancient, awkward religious statue, holding up the sky.

  The detectives carried out the body-search. They were looking for knives and guns. They ran their fingers over her breasts, over her skirt. Front and back.

  ‘Nothing,’ they said. ‘Nothing.’

  By now they had finished searching the premises. The van could come and take the bodies away. The police doctor and the commissioner were signing forms at the table. The commissioner turned to the detectives and instructed them to take her in.

  Anna was still holding her arms up. There was no point in it since they had forgotten about her. The detectives waved at her to lower them.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  She didn’t move. So one of them took hold of her arm but she casually pushed him away. The commissioner who had been walking up and down, stopped.

  ‘Handcuff her,’ he told the detective. The man put one wrist above the other, encircled them with the metal, then quietly closed the lock. Anna allowed him. She stared curiously at her handcuffed hands.

  It was a brand-new pair of handcuffs, still bright; the chain was cheap and thin but strong. It was impossible to break the links. She had imagined them to be thicker, rustier, with a clumsy ball at the end. And yet it seemed she recognized them from somewhere, from some dim past, perhaps from folk legends, some story where the royal palace always backs on to the prison. She no longer found them strange. She stared at them indifferently and stood there as if she had grown used to them, had always worn them.

  The detective put on his black bowler and led her away. People were whispering on the corridor: ‘. . . the murderer . . . look it’s the murderer . . .’ Stefi and Etel were leaning over the second-floor gallery; pale, they clapped their hands in astonishment. The whole house was shaking.

  Later two black coffins were carried up the same stairs. They lifted the bodies in and took them away to the mortuary for dissection, then cold storage.

  But one surprise gave way to another. Half an hour later the detectives returned and took away the Ficsors under suspicion as accomplices to the crime. In the course of the enquiry there was some suggestion that they might have been in league with the killer, and that their relatives might also have been involved.

  Back in the shattered house Etel took over the caretaker’s duties and Druma assumed overall command. He sent Stefi to the post office with two telegrams: one for the late Mrs Vizy’s brother in Eger, the other for Jancsi who had already returned to Vienna. He was in constant touch with the police. It was he who attended to the reporters who began arriving in droves once the news was out. They wanted to interview him, and the servants too, anyone who might be able to provide some colourful copy.

  Otherwise everything went to pieces. Moviszter made only the faintest attempt to keep up his surgery then went over to see Druma. The lodgers, all hungover from yesterday’s party, huddled together sleepy and shivering. Mrs Druma offered milky coffee and rolls to the visitors, who were all naturally preoccupied by the horrific events.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ wailed Mrs Moviszter. ‘However I try, I don’t understand, I just can’t get it into my head. A girl like that, such a decent creature . . .’

  ‘I’ve had my suspicions of her for some time,’ said Mrs Druma. ‘There was a wicked look in her eye. She had a sly face.’

  ‘But she had been with them almost a year. And we all knew her. She looked so reliable.’

  ‘Wait!’ Mrs Druma clapped her hand to her brow, ‘I’ve just remembered. I used to have a pair of little nail-scissors. I was very fond of them. They disappeared after Christmas. Stefi and I looked for them for weeks. Remember I told you I couldn’t find them? We had no idea who might have stolen them. After all no one comes here. Stefi doesn’t steal, neither does your Etel. There you are then: she took them.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I do, my dear. I am convinced of it. A person who is capable of murder is capable of anything. It’s not just idle talk – you know us, we’re not like that, thank heaven. But I’d stake my life on it: she took those scissors.’

  ‘Incredible,’ mumbled Mrs Moviszter. ‘It’s quite terrifying for a person to realize one really doesn’t know the people one’s living with. It gives me the shivers.’

  There was a solemn, nervous atmosphere in the room. Mrs Druma sat her little boy on her lap, kissed him and shuddered as she looked round the smart dining room with all its middle-class comforts. Her husband stood up. He still couldn’t forget his experience of the afternoon, what he had seen with his own eyes. He began to orate.

  ‘They have poisoned the soul of the whole Hungarian nation. The swines and scoundrels. It would have been unimaginable before. Such a monstrous deed. But this is the result of all that Communist propaganda, those schools of agitation. It’s the last fling of Bolshevism.’

  ‘And the war,’ Moviszter added.

  ‘I believe,’ started Mrs Moviszter, ‘that she must have been mad. A sane person doesn’t act like this. Ultimately she had no motive. It is inexplicable.’

  ‘Inexplicable?’ Druma retorted. ‘I beg your pardon, excellent lady. It’s easy to say that. And what about two human lives? They should string her up. And you Miklós? Do you regard it as inexplicable?’

  ‘At the moment she committed it, certainly. But in any case . . .’

  ‘You hear that? Even her husband thinks so, though he is a doctor. Fine, let’s all go and get ourselves murdered! No, string her up. Even if she is ill. We have to cut her out like a poisonous growth. They were all in it together: Ficsor, that Bolshevik scoundrel, his wife, the whole gang. You can’t cure this with a piece of medical mumbo-jumbo by claiming that she is pregnant, or highly strung; you need proper legal insight. Think what would happen to society. I insist, we must burn out this nest of serpents, we must wipe them out, all of them. If someone disturbs the social order they must pay for it. There must be no mercy. Hang her, I say. Hang her . . .’

  The Drumas’ little boy began snuffling in his mother’s arms. She snatched him up and walked him to and fro to settle him down. Drama too was jumpy. Where was Stefi all this time? After all she only had to run to the post office in the high street.

  Now a girl stole into the house and up the dark stairwell. She drifted silent as a shadow to the first floor. She stayed close to the wall. No one saw her. She stopped before the Vizys’ door, which now bore a large police seal, and rang the bell repeatedly.

  She waited for minutes and when no one came she sat down in front of the door and burst into bitter tears. Etel ran to the Drumas.

  ‘Please come down,’ she gasped, out of breath. ‘Katica is here.’

  ‘Katica?’ they repeated, startled, since on this ill-fated day everything seemed to be a harbinger of disaster. ‘Who is Katica?’

  ‘The girl who used to be the Vizys’ servant.’

  ‘What does she want here?’ Druma spluttered nervously. ‘Why wasn’t the gate locked? Who let her in?’

  They all piled out into the corridor. There they were deeply moved to see the servant, the previous servant, in a white skirt, pink blouse and lacquered shoes, sitting before her dead employer’s door like a living statue of faithfulness, a loudly lamenting revenant.

  ‘She’s mourning for them,’ whispered Etel, and she too wiped a tear from the corner of the eye. Indeed the sight was so affecting, so beautiful and unusual it might have been the last chapter of a cheap paperback novel. Even the miscellaneous crowd of strangers who had made thei
r way into the stairwell found it fascinating.

  Druma instructed Etel to go down and send the intruders away, to lock the gate and bring the girl up. Katica was inconsolable. The hot tears kept coursing down her cheeks. Etel slapped her back. She had needed considerable physical support to get up the stairs and into the Drumas’ kitchen. Here they sat her down. But no sooner had she opened her mouth to speak than she started blubbering again. Eventually, with some difficulty, she managed to explain how she got here.

  She told them she had just read the news in the evening paper, got dressed immediately and ran as quickly as she could to catch a last sight of his and her excellency. Finer people never lived.

  ‘I knew it would happen,’ she gasped for air. ‘I felt it, and dreamt it.’

  ‘What did you dream, Katica love?’ asked Etel.

  ‘I dreamt she was a bride,’ she sobbed.

  ‘The honourable lady?’

  ‘Such a beautiful pale bride, she was. With a white veil. A wreath on her head.’

  ‘That’s a bad sign. Weddings always mean bad news.’

  ‘And we were busily cooking and baking, we slaughtered so much poultry the fat was fairly dripping.’

  ‘Receptions are even worse.’

  ‘I actually wanted to come over and warn her. Oh if only I had come! Oh if only I had never gone away! The best place in the whole of Budapest.’

  Katica squeezed her nose. Her handkerchief was as drenched as a washing-up cloth.

  To distract her from her grief, Mrs Druma asked, ‘And where are you working now, Katica?’

  ‘Nearby. He’s an engineer at the gasworks.’ She burst into tears again.

  ‘Come along now, come along. No more tears. Look, here’s Stefi.’

  She poured some milky coffee into a cup, topped it with thick, rich cream and offered it to her.

  ‘Drink it, Katica love. There’s a couple of nice fresh rolls there too. Stefi dear, have some coffee yourself, you haven’t even had tea yet. Bring some fruit, you’ll find it in the sideboard. What about you, Etel. Wouldn’t you like a cup of coffee? Go on, all of you, have something to drink. What can we do? Sadly, what’s done is done.’

  They left the servants to themselves. The three maids sat red eyed and silent. Katica was drunk with grief. The thick rice-powder on her face had soaked through and was beginning to curdle. But when the other two servants started to describe the murder in mouth-watering detail her interest was aroused. Even with her limited imagination she could follow events, and she was intimately acquainted with the scene of the crime. She kept asking for ever more detail, her curiosity was insatiable. And later, when the girls had run out of things to say, she herself repeated the whole story, entering into the spirit of it to the extent that she experienced it all quite graphically, and felt the horror as clearly as if she had been there. She was only sorry that the poor things had been taken away before she arrived. She would have liked to see them once more, or at least the honourable lady, frozen in her blood, in the bed that she herself had so often made for her.

  ‘You see,’ said Druma, ‘this shows what kind of people they were. If even their ex-servant is so grief-stricken, they can’t have been such bad sorts. What sort of a girl was Katica, anyway?’

  ‘A well-meaning girl,’ his wife answered. ‘Hard working and, as far as I know, morally reliable. She was their best servant. I don’t understand why they let her go in the first place. If she had stayed the whole thing would certainly not have happened. Don’t you think so, doctor?’

  ‘Possibly,’ replied Moviszter, in deep thought, ‘possibly.’

  19

  Why

  Such sensations are quickly forgotten. For a couple of days while the news is hot everyone talks about it, then it evaporates in its own heat.

  It was the same in this case. At first it was feverishly debated throughout the district, without any clear conclusions as to its causes. Viatorisz’s greengrocer shop became a haven of gossip. Day after day ladies and servants discussed it among the tubs of caustic soda and the sacks of beans. The question everybody was asking themselves and others was ‘why’? But no one had a satisfactory answer, not for themselves nor for anyone else.

  Society showed its solidarity by attending the funeral in great numbers, at the end of which ceremony the victims were laid to rest beside their only daughter, Piroska. Because of the crowds the police were brought in to keep order. Street urchins ran after the coffins hoping to snatch a flower from the various wreaths, bowling each other over in the process. The speeches at the graveside took on a certain political tone. A number of celebrities were observed in the cortège, to say nothing of the guests who had attended the party, the relations of the deceased and Mr and Mrs Patikárius from Eger. Only Jancsi was missing. Apparently he had failed to get the telegram. On the other hand Etelka Vizy, Kornél’s estranged sister, who used to sell fake Egyptian cigarettes, was there sobbing behind her veil, loudly lamenting her brother, her successful and powerful brother.

  Anna Édes made her confession at the police station and was arrested. They took her fingerprints, made her sit for three photographs, then escorted her across to the public prosecutor’s office at the prison in Markó utca. As soon as she stepped in she felt the walls collapsing on her.

  She saw a towering iron edifice glimmering in the grey light of dawn. It was full of iron doors and stairs that rang and rumbled constantly like an enormous mill that is forever grinding. Her warders took her up to the third floor and locked her in a cell. It contained a bed, a chair, a table and a closet, but it was relatively clean, and lighter and more spacious than her kitchen. She could hardly believe that this was prison. She thought prison was a place where the inmates slept on sacking, while snakes and toads glared at them in the dark. She sat down in the chair. She didn’t cry but spent a long time in thought. In the evening she knelt by her bed and prayed.

  Even after minutely studying the police reports, the examining magistrate had no clearer idea of the whys and wherefores of the case than those whose information consisted of nothing more than casual gossip. The prosecutor’s office thought it important to get to the bottom of this complex affair, which might have far-reaching political consequences, especially now, so soon after the collapse of Bolshevism, when order had not yet been conclusively restored. The examining magistrate fell to his task with great gusto. But the more he knew the less he understood. It was one cul-de-sac after another.

  The first concern was to understand the role of the caretakers. The police took them in ‘on remand’. The Ficsors swore blind that they were innocent; so fervent were their protestations that by the next day they had run out of things to say. Their defence consisted of blackening Anna’s name: she was a sly, secretive girl, capable of anything. In any case there was no material proof against them. Viatorisz’s delivery boy testified that Ficsor had sent him away angrily, telling him not to ring the bell because they were still asleep. After the night of a big party Ficsor’s reaction did not necessarily indicate bad faith. After two days the magistrate released the pair of them.

  But he examined the accused every day.

  When they first came for her Anna crossed herself and prepared to yield her soul to heaven in the belief that they were taking her straight to the scaffold. They brought her instead to a thin balding man with a pin in his elasticated tie and a big gold ring on his hairy finger. Anna had thought that this overworked and modestly paid representative of justice would be a very great, very rich man. Later she saw he wasn’t a bad fellow. He spoke to her kindly and gently and she grew used to him, indeed rather tired of him, since he kept nagging away with his questions. She had to repeat time and again what she had been doing at this time and that time. He encouraged her to recall other things which were very difficult and would often help her out because he remembered everything so much better. By now they had built up a picture of the sequence of events in those last days, from hour to hour and minute to minute.

  Anna loo
ked him straight in the eye; she seemed neither broken nor confused. She didn’t deny anything, on the contrary, sometimes it seemed she was accusing herself. The magistrate completed his report of the investigation, paying particular attention to her potential accomplices, though it no longer seemed likely that she had any. The facts agreed, the accused had not altered her confession since she had been taken into custody. The only question she couldn’t answer was why she had done it.

  They questioned the inhabitants of the house in turn.

  Druma’s statement seemed to be the most important. He had seen the girl on the night of the murder, searching through the sideboard and the drawer from which – according to his evidence – she took the knife, and he saw her lurking in the bathroom while the guests were leaving.

  Etel gave a verbose and muddled statement in which there was one eye-catching detail. One Sunday afternoon in spring she had gone out with Anna to visit the citadel on Mount Gellért. Anna lay down on the grass and fell asleep. After a few minutes she woke, startled, and started running down, waving her arms and shrieking like a lunatic. No one knew what was the matter with her and she only stopped when Etel shouted at her, and even then she continued trembling for a long time.

  Stefi, for her part, had met her a fortnight before the murder, in Márvány utca, lurking along before the house where Master Jancsi used to live. Anna noticed her and ran into the stairwell and when Stefi asked her later what she had been doing there she couldn’t give a coherent answer. Even now Anna was incapable of explaining the incident. The magistrate summoned János Patikárius but he wasn’t at his Vienna flat, having, according to the Vienna police, ‘left no forwarding address’. He had been living with a Polish dancer, but she had left the five-room dwelling and returned to Warsaw. None of this seemed particularly important since János Patikárius had not lived in Budapest for over six months.

  They summoned the accused’s parents too. István Édes arrived on the train at dawn, with a pack and a pair of chickens. He was followed by a neat peasant woman, much younger than himself, in red leather slippers. She wasn’t carrying anything. As it was early and they didn’t know their way round the town, they enquired at the Vérmező where the Vizy’s house was, and settled themselves in at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for the Drumas to wake. They presented the honourable lawyer with the two chickens, a pot of cream and some fresh curd, saying it was good to stow something away in case of slack business in the legal profession. Druma explained to them where they should take the official document.