The magistrate examined them too. Anna’s father was a slightly bent and skinny day labourer, long past fifty but not yet grey. His blonde hair had merely faded, grown slightly ashen with time, like broken straw. He twisted his hat in his hand as he answered the magistrate’s questions but kept on glancing over at his spouse with one unhealthy eye whose expression seemed to alternate between humility and cunning. Being a peasant nothing surprised him. The great dramas of life, such as a murder, he accepted as naturally as he did all birth and death. But the old fox attempted to cover this up. He spoke too piteously, his voice creaking and wheedling as if he were intoning the last rites at a funeral. He told how he had married his second wife four years ago and how his daughter, that bad, that wicked girl, was ever like this, headstrong and disobedient, and had been the cause of much trouble at home too, which was why they had sent her away to Pest to be a servant. The stepmother – a clean, hard-working and pretty little thing – kept nodding. She had something to add to his evidence. She leant confidently towards the magistrate and described in horror how Anna had almost hit her once with the sickle, and might have killed her too if her father had not intervened. She chattered on tirelessly, with apparently infinite energy. But then she began to contradict herself. The examining magistrate took stock of the situation and sent them both home.
He examined the mental condition of the accused. The official medical consultant had Anna brought to his surgery and prepared a certificate which stated that the accused was anaemic but perfectly responsible. Having clapped this document into his file along with the others the examining magistrate completed his investigation, and passed the file on to the prosecutor who prepared the charges. Anna Édes was to be tried for two premeditated murders.
They appointed someone to defend her, a small-time, recently qualified barrister whose only experience so far had been with legacies and a property suit and who now threw himself into the case determined to establish his career as a criminal lawyer. He paid frequent visits to his client in prison. He comforted her by saying she shouldn’t despair, he would take care of the matter. Anna spoke to him as she had done to the police officer and the magistrate. Later she was visited by the blue-veiled sisters from the mission who urged her to repent and submit to her fate, and left behind some religious booklets in which she might discover the consolations of faith.
The trial was held in the middle of November, and because of the interest in the case they used the great central hall of justice.
It was a dark cold winter’s day. The gas fires were turned up high and flickered green in the great hall. Clerks bellowed the witnesses’ name. There were eleven of them: six for the prosecution, five for the defence.
The raked public seats of the hall were filled to overflowing with the victims’ friends and acquaintances to the right. Gábor Tatár sat with his wife just behind the journalists’ row, and greeted the witnesses as they passed him to take their places at the front. There were all the inhabitants of 238 Attila utca – masters, servants and all.
At precisely nine the bench entered: the presiding judge (or president of court) and his two assistant judges. The president rang his bell. ‘I declare this hearing open. We will hear the case of Anna Édes who is accused of murder. Where is the accused? Lead her in,’ he commanded one of the guards.
Anna had been brought down to the basement at eight o’clock and was patiently waiting in her cell. The doors opened and there she stood in her calico dress which had grown quite ragged. Two guards with fixed bayonets escorted her in. She didn’t so much walk as stumble dizzily to the accused’s bench before the judges. The guards who were right on her heels made sure she was sitting properly then snapped to attention.
Anna took in the crowd, the pictures and the lights and felt very warm. The six months of imprisonment had had no ill effect on her. Her face had rounded out a little as many prisoner’s do, and her skin looked like marble with its subterranean pallor. She conveyed an air of great calm.
‘What is your name?’ asked the president, his eyes already moving past her to one of his fellows on the bench. ‘Are these your papers?’ And he quickly read out the details himself. ‘Twenty years old, spinster, childless, no criminal record. Sit down,’ he ordered without looking at her.
The accused sat down, and the two guards sat either side of her, the butts of the rifles between their feet.
The charge was read from a scarlet piece of paper. It began: ‘Anna Édes, Roman Catholic, unpropertied, Hungarian . . .’ It was a long list whose reading took half an hour. In the meantime the public inspected the judges who sat on their raised bench without wigs or gowns, in ordinary suits and ties with hard-collars, but with a certain impersonal authority. If they seemed ageless it was because it was their miraculous earthly vocation to see the truth clearer than others; this had been their study and their livelihood and when they died their tombstones would bear the word: judge.
The president was searching through a book; his elder colleague, the rapporteur, a long-nosed, moustached man wearing a lorgnette, was gathering documents, while the short, thick-set younger man – the so-called voting judge – propped his elbows on the table and rested his heavy head on his right hand. Somewhat to the left of the president a little man was being conspicuously busy. It was the defending counsel. He greeted his father, his mother and other relatives who had come in great numbers to witness his first major performance. The prosecution was lost in his own thoughts.
Once the charges had been read the president asked Anna to stand up. ‘Anna Édes! Do you understand the charges?’ He spoke to her in a loud clear voice as one might speak to a deaf man or to someone not quite of one’s own intellectual capacity. ‘The prosecution charges you with the murder of your employers. Do you plead guilty?’
‘I plead guilty,’ Anna answered. There was whispering in the auditorium. The rapporteur stared at her, the voting judge propped his head on his left hand instead.
‘In that case,’ continued the president in a more anecdotal manner, ‘tell us nicely what happened. In detail please. Before you start, let me remind you that if you confess to all the charges that will count in your favour, on the other hand if you deny any one of them,’ and again he raised his voice, ‘then you can only harm your case, because we have enough evidence to convict you of them all. So, you may begin.’
The lawyer indicated for his client to begin. But she stood there wordlessly, incapable of speech. The president hastened to help her.
‘I believe you were the servant, and had worked some ten months at the Vizys’. Perhaps we could begin with the evening of the party on the twenty-eighth of May, the big “do”,’ he tried to affect a popular manner. ‘You spent the evening working.’
‘I was cooking.’
‘Correct,’ nodded the president in approval. ‘You were going about your domestic chores. The guests arrived but you did not serve them. Now, they have long since finished their supper. It’s about two o’clock in the morning. Where are you then?’
‘In the kitchen.’
‘That’s right, that is where you are. You are already searching the cupboard and pulling out the drawers, looking for the knife.’
‘I don’t remember that,’ Anna’s voice shook as she glanced at her counsel, who nodded back at her, satisfied.
‘It will be testified against her. Then what did you do?’
‘Then I went into the bedroom.’
‘Let’s not get confused. You didn’t go into the bedroom yet. That came later. First the guests left. At that time you were lurking in the bathroom, lying in wait, preparing for the deed. Do you not remember that Mr Druma looked in and saw you there?’
‘No.’
‘No matter, that too will be established later. We have the witness. Let us continue. Let us return to the point at which you have aired the rooms and your mistress tells you to go to bed. But then, instead of going to bed, you waited for them to go to sleep.’
‘And then I went into t
he bedroom.’
‘No, no. You still did not go into the bedroom!’ cried the president striking the table.
Anna shifted from one foot to the other, her mind running to and fro in an attempt to recall the past. She began to feel a little faint because of all her travelling.
She was stuck. Her lawyer rose.
‘Your honour, honourable bench! With due respect I request the court to summon an eminent psychiatrist so that here and now he may establish the mental condition of the accused. Her confession is so disconnected, so incoherent, so pathological that in my honest opinion she cannot be held at all responsible for her actions.’
The president quietly conferred with his fellow judges and expressed their view.
‘The bench rejects the request. As the honourable counsel himself knows the accused has been examined several times by specialists and has been proclaimed by them to be responsible. In any case, I instruct the court to make a record of all counsels’ requests.’
‘I humbly withdraw the request,’ said the lawyer.
The president returned to the topic in hand, and proceeded carefully through her testimony, helping the accused, leading her towards the truth, until he himself was lost in the dark and had to wait for her to lead him towards some source of light in the hope that one of these might illuminate the whole case. They went along together like two closely bound blind men, first one then the other leading, neither seeing anything.
‘So,’ he began, ‘just try to recall. Why did you pick up the knife? What did you feel as you did so?’
Anna was silent. The president tried to interpret her silence, to describe her indescribable feelings and render them plain in plain grammar.
‘You felt angry with them, the blood suddenly rushed to your head, you were no longer in control of your actions. You might have remembered how the woman had told you off, and you wanted revenge. But why?’
Again he was forced to continue.
‘And did not your conscience rise in revolt, did your soul not raise its voice in protest, did you not consider what you were doing or the consequences of your actions, that you would have to answer for your deeds to man and God? After all, the deed was out of character for you.’
The president felt there might be some hidden secret here, a secret no one knew, perhaps not even the accused herself. But he went on. He knew that an action could not be explained by any one cause, nor even by a combination of causes, and that behind every action stood the whole person with his whole life, which a court of law was incapable of examining. Even so, while he knew full well that people were incapable of fully knowing each other, he had his duty to perform.
‘Speak,’ he urged the accused. ‘When you entered the bedroom your employers were already asleep. What did you do then?’
‘Then I . . .’
‘Go on. Say it,’ said the president, very sternly. ‘Then you went over to the woman’s bed, and while she was still sleeping you stabbed her through the heart with a knife. With this knife here.’
He lifted the giant knife from among the exhibits, and swung it in the air so the court let out a gasp of horror, then he held it out towards the defendant, and, still turning it over and over in his hand, he asked her, ‘Was this the knife?’
‘Yes,’ answered Anna and started back because she felt the knife was being twisted in her heart.
Finally she stuttered out how it happened. Not so much in her own words as in the words used by the police and by the examining magistrate. She was quite coherent by the end of her account.
‘You killed your mistress,’ repeated the president. ‘You killed the woman who fed you, who never harmed you. Let us proceed. What did you do then?’
‘I ran through into the sitting room.’
‘No, you did not run out yet. Let’s not be too hasty. Let us remain in the bedroom for now. You stabbed your master too, like some common assassin, stabbed him nine times with the knife. Is that correct?’
‘Yes. But I didn’t want to harm his excellency. He scared me.’
‘What scared you was your crime, and your conscience, and so you committed another murder. What happened then?’
‘Then they came for me.’
‘No, of course they didn’t. No, you lay down on the big couch and there . . .’
‘I fell asleep.’
‘And could you sleep after such an abominable deed? Were you not, even then, aware of what you had done? Of your guilt? You didn’t say anything to anyone but remained hiding there until the door was broken down. Are you at least sorry for what you have done? Pardon? Would you do it again?’
‘No!’ cried Anna, startled. ‘No.’
‘You may sit down,’ said the president.
The prosecution’s chief witness was Szilárd Druma, the red-faced solicitor. When he rose and approached the bench he visibly grew with pride.
‘You have no quarrel with the accused?’ the judge rattled out the formalities. ‘You are not a relative of hers?’
The witness never even answered but smiled in a superior fashion at the amusing suggestion that he might have any kinship to a creature like her.
Methodically, he summed up the objective facts that settled any doubts about premeditation. He answered the prosecution’s questions briefly using appropriate technical terms. He described how the girl’s nervous demeanour had already aroused his suspicions, and that he had kept a careful eye on her thenceforth, that at two in the morning the accused could only have been seeking a knife in the kitchen drawer, one which she must have hidden somewhere, and then how he saw her for the last time when she was lurking in the bathroom, and even offered her a tip but she had leapt back startled and disappeared into the bedroom.
When faced by this evidence, Anna broke down and admitted it was so.
But Druma wasn’t finished.
‘I would like permission,’ he said, ‘to throw some light on the political background of the accused, and in passing to refer,’ and he pointed to Ficsor and his wife sitting among the other witnesses, ‘to the role of the caretakers. These people, your honour, behaved in such an extreme Bolshevik manner at the time of the commune that the whole house lived in terror of them. For my part I can see every reason to suspect that it was they who were the prime movers and intellectual . . .’
‘Excuse me,’ the president broke in, ‘there has already been an enquiry in this direction too but the results were negative. The prosecution did not see fit to pursue it.’ And he glanced at the prosecutor who shook his head. ‘This is irrelevant.’
Druma stood with his half-finished sentence hanging in the air.
There was a short debate between the defending and prosecuting counsels. The prosecution asked that the witness should take the oath, the defence objected. Druma was released from his oath. Again the defence requested that it be wiped from the records.
Antal Szücs, the local constable, described certain significant incidents before the official inspection of the scene of the crime, and made mention of the accused’s indifferent reactions.
Mrs Druma said the girl was secretive, and brought up – in passing – the question of her missing nail scissors. She expressed a high opinion of the Vizys, particularly the husband.
Mrs Moviszter appeared in a slit skirt and premièred her latest make-up, which would have done honour to a theatrical matinge. She talked in a relaxed manner and flirted with the prosecution. According to her the girl was not secretive but rather open and good humoured, and she was amazed that she could do this kind of thing since her mistress was a veritable angel, and what’s more, was fond of her. She would happily have chattered on but, alas, her cross-examination was soon over.
The president advised Ficsor that since he was related to the accused he could, if he wished, decline to give evidence, but Ficsor wanted to be examined.
‘I must warn you,’ the president said, ‘that you are bound to tell the truth, because I may ask you to take the oath, and the law deals severely with perjurer
s, with imprisonment for up to five years.’
The caretaker, who was already reeling from Druma’s previous speech, was further frightened by the mention of five years imprisonment and was more determined than ever to save his skin. He repeated everything he had said to the examining magistrate that summer, and when the little lawyer tried to provoke him by questioning the validity of his evidence he lost all sense of proportion.
‘That’s not the only thing she said, if you please, there were many more incidents. Once, when the honourable lady told her off for breaking a mirror, she came down to us and said that she was going to leave, but before she did she’d do something she would herself regret – she would burn the house down.’
‘When did she say this?’
‘Shortly after she took up the post.’
‘You are certain you remember this?’
‘Quite certain.’
‘Think it over. Would you repeat it under oath?’
‘I would,’ answered Ficsor, with real resolve.
So he took the oath and bowed to the bench, such a deep bow that it would have been humanly impossible to bow lower.
Then Mrs Ficsor rose to give evidence. The fat woman was quivering like jelly. She was already feeling sorry for Anna and would have like to say something in her defence, but was afraid of contradicting her earlier statement.
‘What about you now, Mrs Ficsor?’ the president asked her. ‘What sort of a girl did you think she was?’
‘She was always sort of suspicious, if you please.’
‘What do you mean suspicious?’
Anna Edes Page 21
