Anna Edes

by Dezso Kosztolányi

  ‘She was sort of shifty.’

  ‘You mean with you.’

  ‘With everyone else, too.’

  ‘What made you think so?’

  ‘She was always thinking of something.’

  ‘Do you mean she was contemplating evil thoughts?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I mean, she was always mournful.’

  ‘But in your statement to the examining magistrate you said something different. Look. Read it. You stated that on one occasion she had already wanted to murder someone.’

  ‘Yes, when she struck her mother with the scythe.’

  ‘Did you see this yourself?’

  ‘No I didn’t. I only heard about it.’

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘From her mother.’

  ‘You mean her stepmother. I think we’ve heard enough about this,’ said the president with a gesture of boredom. ‘Let’s leave it.’

  ‘I’ve nothing to say against her otherwise. She used to be a good girl, but . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘But later she was bad.’

  ‘The court is already aware of that,’ remarked the president, to universal hilarity.

  ‘Your honour your excellency.’ objected Mrs Ficsor with a certain stubbornness, plainly wounded, ‘I can only tell you what I know,’ and when the public burst into laughter once again, she carried on fuming, ‘I, if you please, can only tell you what I know.’

  ‘Thank you, that will do. Please return to your place.’ The president waved her away.

  The statements were full of such useless details and quickly declined into mere gossip.

  The president called the next witness. ‘Miklós Moviszter, doctor of medicine. Where is he? Did he receive the subpoena? He didn’t appeal against it. Where is he?’

  Where indeed are you, old doctor, you who are supposed to be dying, incurable, with your eight per cent sugar? Have you in fact died, or are you lying helpless, languishing in the trance that precedes death in cases such as yours? Are you too lost? Is there nobody left on this earth? If you are still alive, if you have but a spark of life in you, then this is where you should be, then it is your duty to attend.

  He had attended. He was sitting right at the back, lost among the other witnesses, lost in his fur coat this November day, growing ever cooler as death drew near. It took him a little time to come forward, leaning on his stick, his body bent and shrunk to such an extent that some members of the public had to stand up to see him.

  ‘Present,’ he said, bowing to the bench.

  The president, seeing his condition, said he might sit down to give his evidence. He ordered one of the guards to fetch a chair for him. He wouldn’t accept it, rather he seemed to stand a little straighter, or at least as straight as he could.

  ‘Now doctor,’ the president asked him, ‘are you too prepared to stand by your previous statement?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Moviszter, almost inaudibly, so the judge had to cup his ear to hear him.

  ‘Kindly explain to the court the views you there expressed.’

  Moviszter looked as if he were preparing a speech. He was urging himself on. What are you waiting for? Do your duty. You’re only one man. But what is greater than one man? Not two, not a thousand add up to more. Now step forward, just one step – so – and just one more step. It’s your turn. Raise your head, Moviszter, sursum corda, and be strong, only be strong.

  ‘I didn’t hear you,’ said the judge, ‘a little louder please.’

  Why a little louder? Not a little louder, but much louder. Shout it out – his heart was beating fast – shout it out as the ancient Christian priests and martyrs did, when they spoke against the pagans, in the cemeteries, in their very graves, appealing to heaven, disputing with God himself on high, that just but terribly stern God, demanding grace for sinful humanity. Have you not repeated quietly to yourself, every day, the prayer before death. Do you remember what it says? Ne tradas bestiis animas confidentes tibi. Cast not those that trust in you to the ravening beasts. Et animas pauperum tuorum ne obliviscaris in finem. And abandon not the souls of thy poor. Try now yourself to cry out in the arena, outroar even the lions, brave catechumen.

  His voice grew firmer. ‘I fully stand by my previous statement. I can say nothing but what I said there.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the president, leafing through a sheaf of notes. ‘We have here what you said. But we want some facts. Did they beat her? Or starve her? Or overwork her? Did they not pay her? I see from this,’ he quickly said, ‘that at Christmas they even gave her a present, though it wasn’t of much significance. A waistcoat. What have you to say?’

  ‘They behaved coldly towards her,’ stated Moviszter, his voice again firmer. ‘I always felt so. They gave her no affection. They were heartless.’

  ‘And how did this heartlessness show itself?’

  ‘It is hard to say precisely. But it was distinctly my impression.’

  ‘Then these are only feelings, doctor, mere suspicions, such delicate shades of behaviour that this bench, faced by such a brutal and terrible crime, can hardly take them into account. Because on one side we have facts: bloody facts. And we too require facts. Besides, the other witnesses all disagree with you. They directly contradict you. According to them the couple loved and respected her. The accused herself has made no complaint, neither to the police nor to the examining magistrate. Stand up, girl,’ he told Anna. ‘Did they hurt you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You may sit down. It was highly unlikely in any case.’

  Look at the girl, Moviszter, how numbly she sinks down again between the guards. It’s not a pretty sight, but look at her, and look at the judge too, as he adjusts the cheap lorgnette at his wrinkled blue eyes and starts scratching his ear so you shouldn’t guess his thoughts or his emotions. He is merely the representative of earthly justice. But he does try to see the truth impartially, to take a wide view as far as it is humanly possible. Don’t you feel – he encouraged himself – that he is on the way to administering heaven’s justice too and is already on your side? Let him fret away with his arguments a while, after all it is his duty, then speak again yourself, don’t be afraid of him or of anybody, for God is with you.

  ‘And even if she had been ill-treated,’ reasoned the president, ‘then it was her right under law to register a complaint against her employers at any time; she could have given in her notice and left within fifteen days.’

  ‘They forced her to stay.’

  ‘How did they force her? You can’t tie someone down with ropes.’

  ‘She was such a simple helpless creature.’

  ‘That’s no reason for her to commit this dreadful crime,’ the president meditated, then added more sternly, ‘It is no excuse.’

  ‘Then why did she do it?’ asked Moviszter, forgetting himself. ‘My impression,’ he stubbornly repeated, ‘my impression is that they did not deal with her as with a human being. To them she was not a human being but a machine. They turned her into a machine,’ he raised his voice almost to a shout. ‘They treated her without humanity. They were beastly to her.’

  ‘I must reprimand you for this outburst.’

  The public shifted uneasily and murmured furious approval of the president’s action.

  ‘Quiet please,’ said the president, and carelessly tinkled his bell. For whom did this brief bell toll?

  ‘You have nothing else to add?’ asked the rapporteur.

  ‘Nothing else.’

  The public felt that the doctor was at death’s door, verging on senility, or in any case severely handicapped. Indeed Moviszter was handicapped. He had one chief handicap, without which his stature would have shrunk to nothing or been lost in the vast empty spaces of the soul.

  The quicksilver little lawyer sprang from his seat and asked the court’s grace to register the witness’s testimony by swearing him in. The prosecution objected on the grounds that Moviszter’s evidence consisted
of insignificant generalities.

  The president made a quick decision.

  ‘The bench overrules the objection. Swear the witness in.’

  The public in the auditorium immediately rose noisily and excitedly, as if at the theatre. Even the president stood up as he addressed the witness, who was waiting, his right hand on his heart, three fingers of his left hand raised.

  ‘Repeat after me.’ And he dictated the formal oath.

  ‘I . . . solemnly swear . . . before the living God who sees and knows all . . . that I have told the truth . . . and nothing but the truth . . . neither neglecting . . . nor altering any part of it . . . so help me God.’

  Moviszter repeated it loudly and clearly. He shuffled back to his seat among the other witnesses, who moved away from him as he settled down. Moviszter didn’t care. He was never one of them anyway. Not them nor anyone else, having never been a Communist nor a bourgeois, nor a member of any party but that of humankind generally, those who had lived or were living, the quick and the dead.

  He soon left in any case and went about his business, not bothering to hear the rest.

  There were a few more helpful witnesses to come. Etel, dressed in her cook’s outfit and Stefi wearing a hat, as befits a maid who once worked for aristocracy. When they read out her personal details Stefánia Kulhanek added a reference to herself as ‘household staff’ and blushed. They both took the oath to swear the truth and nothing but the truth, as did the others, who were always sincerely telling the truth, from their own point of view. They praised Anna, but they praised the poor honourable lady and his excellency, her husband, equally.

  Anna, who had been sitting indifferently on the accused bench, suddenly became alert. She had spotted Mrs Wild, the warehouse owner’s wife who had given her her first job as children’s nurse, when she first arrived in Budapest at the age of sixteen. She grew very agitated.

  And there before the president Mrs Cifka, Bandi’s great aunt, was already giving evidence, and Bandi must be quite big now, possibly going to school. Now she was really nervous. She thought of a thousand things at once.

  The hearing ran on and on. The judge tried to speed things up: as soon as the prosecution had finished, and the defence had lodged his twenty-seventh objection, he declared this part of the procedure finished and ordered an adjournment.

  At two o’ clock it was time for the counsels to make their final speeches. The prosecution did not take long. He claimed that the charges had all been proved and that this was increasingly clear from the proceedings, and quoting particular paragraphs and clauses asked for an exemplary sentence.

  The little novice lawyer had prepared himself to the last detail and his speech was full of fine phrases and literary references. He made a superhuman effort to clear his client and to loosen the noose that witnesses and accused alike had contrived to slip round her neck. His over-enthusiasm was comical. He found arguments to show that the accused was not responsible for her actions at the time of the crime, and that she had killed her master out of self-defence. He recounted her childhood and previously unblemished life in details that would have made a novelist envious. He urged that a hundred guilty should go free rather than one innocent suffer.

  Every time they thought he had finished he would begin again.

  ‘And now,’ he said, drinking a glass of water, ‘I ask the honourable bench to consider the psychological causes. Yes, let us examine her psychology; the facts, your honours, of her psychological state. Consider, if you please, this village maiden, this simple child of the people, and before bringing judgement, let us be honest with each other. Is the woman sitting on the accused bench truly the criminal type that Lombroso calls uomo delinquente?’

  No one was listening by now. The door kept opening and closing. The public, exhausted by the long procedure and by the unbearable heat, was taking to its heels; soon only the journalists remained to laugh, and the lawyer’s relatives who were obliged by their sense of family duty.

  Druma was out in the dark corridor, enveloped in a wreath of cigarette smoke, talking to some people and weighing up the motives for the crime. He was in no doubt that it would be hanging for her.

  When they drifted back into the court the defence was still speaking. He was quoting long extracts of a psychological study by Pierre Janet. The presiding judge consulted his watch, the rapporteur was already drafting the text of the verdict on a piece of paper.

  Finally the orator began to wind up his speech, and produced his most affecting sentences, enunciating them with such lyrical force that those who had run out of patience grew positively angry, and those who had some understanding of these matters began to regard him with sincere contempt. He was quoting from Madách’s masterpiece, The Tragedy of Man. Then he finished.

  The bench retired to consider their verdict.

  In the meantime sleet began to fall. Those who had come out without an umbrella worried about how they would get home.

  Three quarters of an hour later the three judges returned and practically ran up to the dais. The accused hadn’t yet arrived.

  ‘Bring her in,’ ordered the president and looked up at the ceiling, the sentence in his hand. Guns clinked. Anna Édes was quickly ushered in. They stood her in her place. She looked deathly pale now. She was very frightened at the thought of death and of the rope. She kept swallowing: her throat was constantly moving.

  ‘I now announce the verdict of the court. In the name of the Hungarian state . . .’

  The benches grew loud again. One could only hear the odd word of the sentence.

  ‘. . . guilty by her own admission . . . and for this reason the court . . . fifteen years in prison . . . loss of political rights . . .’

  ‘Fifteen . . .’ people echoed in surprise, ‘fifteen . . .’ and most of them felt moved by it, since they felt the sentence was just. A few women began to weep.

  The little lawyer cast a triumphant glance in the direction of his relatives. He was convinced that his speech and those quotations from Pierre Janet must have had something to do with it.

  The verdict went on to say that the bench considered the merciless quality of the crime an aggravating factor but it took into account the extenuating circumstances of the accused’s previously unblemished life, her obvious sense of guilt and the fact of her simplicity and low intelligence.

  ‘Do you understand the verdict?’ the president asked Anna in his previous loud voice. ‘The bench has sentenced you to fifteen years’ imprisonment. It is your right to appeal.’

  The defence and prosecution fell over each other to lodge appeals, but by this time the public had gone and Anna was left practically alone with her judges.

  ‘Take her away,’ the president said quietly to the guards.

  Two days later she was taken to the local prison, and here she awaited the result of two appeals, one to the Royal Panel and one to the Curia. The first was to come in spring, the second a year after the trial, about Christmas time. Both allowed the verdict of the bench to stand. The newspapers said nothing about this, public interest in the affair having exhausted itself.

  One cold day in January Anna Édes was escorted by two guards on to a train for Maria-Nosztra. The prison gates slammed behind her. Her name was registered, her hair was shorn, she was given a bath, a number, and a coarse uniform; she began her proper sentence.

  Now and then her name might be mentioned in the Krisztina district, but these occasions grew rarer.

  Once a woman stopped before the house in Attila utca and said to her husband, ‘This is where she lived. Don’t you remember her? Such a tall girl, strong, with dark eyes and big hands.’

  ‘She was plain,’ said the man.

  ‘No, she was quite pretty,’ replied the woman, ‘decidedly pretty. When the Romanian army was still here she had a Romanian soldier for her lover.’

  And so all memory of her faded. By now nobody knew who she was or anything about her. She was quite forgotten. She simply disappeared, and it made n
o difference to anyone whether she was in the prison at Mária Nosztra or resting under the acacias of the graveyard beyond the Danube, in the village of Balaton-Főkajár.

  20

  Dialogue before a Green Fence

  Autumn has come round again. They are selling grape juice in the pubs, children are playing with ripe and glossy wild chestnuts. Leaves are falling.

  But the unit of currency, the korona, is also falling. Its value: 0.22. People are in despair. How to eat, or dress, or heat the flat at this price. They wait in trepidation for the coming winter. At noon the stock market is in uproar. It’s inflation, people are winning and losing fortunes. What remains of Hungary after Trianon is accepted into the League of Nations. Another year passes. It is now 1922.

  What has happened since? Every Sunday a military band plays on the promenades of the Vár and pedestrians instinctively fall into step with the blaring brass.

  The Tatárs are out for a walk, without their younger daughter who has got married in the meantime. A clerk at the ministry is courting Ilonka. He once heard that Jancsi was in Poland and is a gigolo.

  What used to be Kornél Vizy’s house looks much the same, except that it has a new caretaker, the other having moved out to one of the occupied territories.

  Mrs Moviszter continues to play the piano and recite the verses of Ady. She makes dates with ever younger men. She paints her hair canary yellow and is running to fat. Her husband is still alive. He shouldn’t be, but despite being prematurely consigned to the grave by official science, the consultants, his colleagues, acquaintances and admirers – and by the late Kornél Vizy – he continues mysteriously to confound every objective evaluation of his condition as well as the forecasts of his friends. No one knows why. Obviously something must be keeping him alive. He is the most trifling detail in anybody’s life; he patiently bears Etel’s increasing moodiness, as well as the humiliations heaped on him by his wife. Everyone smiles at him pityingly.

  Szilárd Druma has legal charge of the house which was given over to his care by Ferenc Patikárius, who had inherited it under the unfortunate circumstances. Druma has persuaded the agents to let him move into the Vizys’ old flat because of the needs of his large practice. He has even repapered it and lives there with his family. A lovely little girl has been born followed by a boy. A German girl looks after the three children who are growing up happily. Stefi still works there but wears glasses as her eyes are weakening. There is also a little wet-nurse with wide mongoloid cheekbones and a coal-black pigtail like a Chinese. Druma’s office takes up the second floor, where his old, more modest flat used to be. Two secretaries tap away at typewriters and visitors have to fill in a form to declare their business with the learned solicitor. He is playing an ever more important role in public affairs too. Soon he intends to stand as a candidate in the local elections, in a ward where no one will oppose him.