The Travellers

by Ann Swinfen

  Some of the figures had coloured glazes. A young bridal pair were wreathed about with flowered garlands and decked in bright peasant costume, although the detail which caught Kate’s eye was their tightly clasped hands, half hidden by the girl’s apron. But it was the monochrome figures which affected her most powerfully. Some, like the old woman, were the dull colour of unglazed brownish clay, as if the woman herself were part of the soil, living only to suffer this terrible pain before she sank back into the earth again. Some of the figures – like the cowherd raising the horn to summon his flock – were terracotta, the glaze glowing with a dull sheen.

  She was so absorbed that at first she did not notice the high relief plaques on the walls. Most of these were the same glazed terracotta as the cowherd, and very large – four or five feet across. The technical problems of making them so large had been solved by constructing them in separate parts for the separate figures, which then fitted together, like a jigsaw, into a harmonious whole. Kate particularly liked a group of shepherds with their sheep. Both men and beasts had long, anxious faces, and as she looked from one to the other she realised that, by exchanging horns for hats, the faces could be interchanged. She laughed aloud in delight.

  A man had come into the room behind her, unnoticed. He smiled at her. Something about her must have betrayed her nationality, for he addressed her in English.

  ‘It is a good joke, is it not?’

  ‘It’s lovely! All of them,’ Kate gestured around the room. ‘What wonderful talent – he’s a genius. Such a range of emotion, such skill hiding under a cloak of simplicity. They’re the most beautiful ceramics I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘The artist – it’s a woman. She studied under Margit Kovacs, our most famous ceramicist, but many of us think this artist has sometimes even greater skill, though no one can deny the wonder of Kovacs’s work. Have you seen her museum in Szentendre?’

  ‘No. I’ve only been in Hungary three days.’

  ‘You should go.’

  ‘I can’t imagine anything could be better than these.’ She looked longingly at the mother and child. The price was high. These were the most expensive items in the gallery. She could afford it, but it would be an extravagance. Also, it would be even more difficult to carry back on the plane than a painting. She peered at the signature scratched into the clay at the base of the figure. It looked like M Buvari.

  Kate sighed. ‘When we come back to Budapest before we leave, I shall have to see if I could manage to carry one home. It would be sacrilege to risk damaging it.’

  ‘I am sure it would be packed very carefully for you.’ He smiled again and gave a little formal bow before going back into the main gallery, leaving her alone with the figures.

  * * *

  The start of the journey on Friday was a nightmare. The hired car (a Peugeot, as Kate had specified) was delivered to the hotel, and apart from the left-hand drive looked familiar enough. They had studied the map of Budapest carefully the night before, and had worked out that their route lay over the Elizabeth Bridge, which was just downriver from their hotel, then along Hegyalja Út to Budaörsi Út, where Kate hoped she would be able to pick up signposts to Vienna, Lake Balaton and the M1.

  Everything went well until they had crossed the Danube. In her eagerness to make an early start, Kate had not given sufficient thought to the morning rush-hour traffic. Despite rural driving years ago in France, she found herself in the wrong lane on the busy highway, and was carried away inexorably on to a sliproad which landed her in a commercial district of Buda thronged with cars. There was nowhere to stop and nowhere to turn.

  Kate felt herself growing hotter and hotter, her hands slippery on the wheel. She crouched forward, trying to read the unpronounceable Hungarian street names, and being hooted at when she dithered at crossroads, uncertain which way to turn. Sofia sat trustingly beside her, with her eyes closed and her head back, apparently dozing after their early start. At last, however, Kate’s tension must have communicated itself to her and she opened her eyes and looked around.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Kate, pushing her hair out of her eyes with one damp hand. ‘I seem to have lost us. I have no idea where we are or which way we ought to be going, and I can’t stop.’

  Sofia became brisk.

  ‘Look, pull in there.’

  ‘It’s a bus stop.’

  ‘I know, but there isn’t a bus nearby. I’ll ask that woman who’s waiting there.’

  Kate pulled in, glancing around fearfully for traffic policemen, while Sofia conducted a brief conversation with the woman at the bus stop.

  ‘Good,’ said Sofia, sitting back in her seat. ‘Can you pull out again into the road? Then you need to be ready to turn left. It is the third turn on the left, she says. Then we go about 500 metres to a main road with a traffic light. Turn right and that will take us straight on to the M1.’

  The woman’s directions were faultless, and in a few minutes they were moving rapidly along the M1 into the suburbs of Buda. There was another bad moment when the M7 led off to Balaton, but Kate managed to stay on the M1, following the signs which now promised Györ as well as Vienna. Budapest drifted away behind them, and they found themselves at last out in the countryside.

  ‘It’s very dry, isn’t it?’ said Kate, as dust swirled from the fields across the road. There were vast landscapes of sunflowers on either side of them, but the heads sagged wearily on their stems, and the petals looked bleached in the sun.

  ‘Yes, I was speaking to a couple from Miskolc while you were signing the forms for the car. He is a wholesale dealer in farm products – is that how you would say it in English? The first few years after the end of communism have been good, but this year everyone is worried about the harvest. There has been so much hot sun and so little rain this year that the corn and the sunflowers are very poor, and unless there is rain soon the grapes will fail too.’

  ‘That would be a great pity, when the country is trying so hard to survive financially. But even with the effects of the drought those fields are spectacular – like a great gold tapestry!’

  The rest of the drive to Györ was easy. The M1 seemed to turn into the E75 and then the E60 without explanation, but caused them no problems. Near a place called Tatabánya Kate suddenly spotted another huge Turul bird high on a hill, looking down at them.

  ‘Look!’ she cried, taking one hand off the wheel to point.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Sofia contentedly. ‘The Turul bird is leading us on still, and watching over us. Is he bringing us to our promised land? To our heart’s desire?’

  Kate glanced sideways at her. Sofia was looking at her quizzically. Kate turned back to the road. To her heart’s desire?

  After that they were quiet, Kate concentrating on her driving and the scenery, Sofia on something she was writing in a small notebook she had taken out of her bag. At last they found themselves in the outskirts of Györ. The man at hotel reception had helpfully drawn them a sketch map, showing the route from the motorway to their hotel in Györ. This time Kate did not get lost, as Sofia read out the directions from the map, but the traffic was heavy, with lorries rushing at top speed, clattering and banging over the poorly made road and hemming Kate in on all sides. It was with relief that she parked, shaking a little, in the area in front of the hotel reserved for guests.

  The hotel was not prepossessing. It had a grim, institutional look, despite a new reception desk in highly varnished wood and some monstrous plants in pots dotted about the small entrance hall. It was much worse upstairs. The lifts could have come from a factory, and the dark, windowless hallways were so narrow that two people meeting had to shuffle past each other sideways. Their room was poky and airless, and felt as though the heat had been accumulating in it for the whole of the long, hot summer. Kate soon found out why. After struggling with the rusted catch on the dirty window, she managed to force it open on to a ‘balcony’ which looked as though it had been fashioned from a tin tray. She was hit by a blast of noise from the
inner ring road below, where all the lorries which had been chasing her before had now congregated and were playing dodgems up and down the worst stretch of urban road in Hungary. The window let in a slight breeze, but the noise was intolerable.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Sofia. ‘I think this must be some left-over institution from the communist regime. Do you suppose the plumbing works?’

  It did – although the water ran brown – and they were able to wash off the stickiness of their journey, but Kate was suspicious of the electric sockets, which sagged perilously from the crumbling plaster of the walls.

  ‘Let’s go out,’ said Kate. ‘I’m sure outdoors will be much better. Parts of Györ are supposed to be quite pretty. I didn’t realise, somehow, that it would be such a big, noisy town.’

  It did not take them long to find their way to the river, and the old town, where there were one or two streets of baroque houses. They dutifully visited the Cathedral and admired the amazing mediaeval gold reliquary in the chapel of St László. Even more remarkable than the beauty of the work, one of the world’s greatest mediaeval treasures, was the fact that it had survived both German and Russian occupations and was still here in Györ. Kate opened her mouth to mention this to Sofia, but she seemed abstracted, and it came to Kate suddenly that they were now very much on Sofia’s home ground. Györ had been the nearest town to her childhood village, and she had probably attended services in this very cathedral in her youth. When they came out again from the dim interior, still cloudy from the incense of a recent service, and stepped into the sun, Sofia emerged from her pensive mood.

  ‘Come,’ she said, as they started down the hill again, ‘I am going to treat you to cakes in the best káféház in Györ. I noticed that it was still in business as we came from the hotel. I suspect the evening meal there will not be of the highest standard, so I suggest we fortify ourselves.’

  On the way to the káféház they passed through the flower market. Kate remembered overhearing a kindly American woman on the boat to Margaret Island talking to her companion, who was Australian.

  ‘This is such a poor country,’ she had said, in tones of the deepest compassion.

  The Australian had agreed, commenting that the clothes she had seen in the shops were made of shoddy materials. Kate had nearly turned round and taken issue with them, but on reflection held her tongue. She thought the Hungarians looked prosperous and happy, and seeing the people of Györ now, strolling about the flower market, strengthened her view. There were buckets full of gladioli and roses and Michaelmas daisies, there were pots of stephanotis and jasmine crowded together on the wooden stalls under gaily flowered awnings. They passed old women who had slipped out in apron and slippers to buy a bunch of flowers and chat to friends behind the stalls. A young man came towards them with an armload of red roses. Surely, thought Kate, a country cannot be poor, either materially or spiritually, where the people find the money to buy flowers for one another?

  * * *

  István had driven down to Szentmargit early, leaving Budapest before seven. As his BMW bumped down the road to the village it was nearly lunchtime. In the fields on the left just before the village he was surprised to see a spray of water arching across the sky. As the curve of water paused at the highest point of the trajectory, the rays of sun were netted by the drops, turning them into diamonds flashing through every colour of the spectrum. Then it sank below the level of the bushes lining the road, only to rise again, slowly, majestically. The field was full of maize, and István noticed that it looked markedly plumper than the maize he had passed on the drive from Budapest. Suddenly he laughed. He remembered that Magdolna had written to him about Imre’s latest invention. Well, at least it appeared to be bearing fruit, literally. The other men in the village sometimes thought Imre quite mad, but this success would have raised his stock considerably.

  Just past the church the road widened out into a broad area of beaten earth surrounded by houses – the village square. On the south side, nearest the church, stood the Trinity column, like those in so many villages in the country raised by survivors of the plague. It was not as fine as the one in Sopron – perhaps the most beautiful in all Hungary – but for István it had the lovely familiarity of home.

  In the centre of the square stood a huge walnut tree, whose broad branches provided welcome shade for the circular wooden bench built round its base, and for half a dozen tables which spilled out from the village csárda, the Blue Heron, during fine weather. Around the remaining sides of the square were grouped the few village shops and one or two private houses. István parked his car in front of the inn. As he opened the door, letting the outside air into the car’s air-conditioned interior, the heat hit him as if he had walked into one of Budapest’s thermal baths. Sweat sprang out on his face, and he wiped it away with his handkerchief, calling and nodding to friends seated at the tables, where they were resting from their work in the fields with a midday drink.

  Inside the inn it was cooler. István bought a bottle of the best Tokay from Mihály behind the bar, and exchanged news. He always liked to bring József a bottle when he came on a visit, and he preferred to give his custom to the village rather than to an impersonal shop in Sopron or Budapest.

  ‘I saw the new irrigation system as I drove in,’ he said.

  Mihály winked at him. ‘Imre’s done us proud this time. There’s probably some regulation about taking water from the Danube without a permit, but nobody much bothers us down here. It’s no bad thing to be tucked away behind our woods and marshes. Too difficult for the interfering bureaucrats to bother with.’

  Yes, thought István, as he started the car again to drive down the last bit of bumpy village street to Magdolna’s house. That was probably why my father and his group operated successfully from here for so long. And he probably would never have been found, if he hadn’t been betrayed by that bastard.

  Until Ferenc Kalla had told him the story of his father’s arrest, he had known nothing of the details. Juliska had managed to get word to Ferenc to lie low in Budapest, and afterwards he had remained there, acting as the agent for distributing Freedom! in the capital until 1956. Like Juliska he had been active in the uprising that year, but unlike her he had managed to escape arrest after the arrival of Soviet troops. No other members of the group had been arrested with István’s father eight years earlier in 1948. Ferenc believed that Lancelot had probably been tortured by the Ávó for information, but must have held out against it, since no one else was seized. The original betrayer, Ferenc thought, had most likely intended to sell his information bit by bit, but had been prevented because of his swift execution by Juliska.

  ‘You have to understand,’ Ferenc had explained, seeing the younger man’s distress, ‘that your mother was only carrying out the regular practice of the partisan bands. Everyone knew that betrayal meant death. The fellow merely showed his arrogance, strolling about in public like that, when it was well known to many people that he was the traitor. Your father was deeply loved and honoured. Everyone expected the group to exact justice for his death.’

  ‘Did my father die then? Soon after he was arrested? For years Magdolna and I hoped he might return from the gulags.’

  ‘No, he survived long enough to be shipped off to Russia. We had spies in the government service who saw the papers. Didn’t your mother ever talk to you about it?’

  ‘She was always very secretive, my mother.’

  He thought about it. As a child he had resented her secrecy, and as an adult had felt she had deprived the two of them of the usual intimacy between mother and children, but now he began to see that the secrecy had been a way of protecting them. Protecting them against questioning, and perhaps also protecting their innocence against the fearful world that surrounded them.

  At the end of the road down from the village he stopped the car and sat studying the house thoughtfully. No one was about at the moment, and the house with its rosy walls slumbered like a contented cat on the river bank, encirc
led by its vegetable garden and fruit trees. It was hard to imagine a more peaceful scene. Yet it had known very different times.

  * * *

  The night is very dark. Moonless. István has woken up and stares around the room. He can hear the soft breathing of his little sister in her cot. He listens. Then he hears again the noise that woke him – a dog barking up in the middle of the village. It barks frantically, angry and frightened. He knows which dog it is – Géza, the innkeeper’s dog, who spends the night in the yard at the side of the inn, tied to a long rope attached to his kennel. Géza barks again, and then there is a sudden agonised yelp, as if someone has kicked him.

  In the bedroom next door he hears his father get out of bed. Mama is away. Often one or both of his parents are away. It has always been like this, even more when they lived in the woods than now, when they live with Grandpa and Grandmama in the village. Papa is moving around, opening and shutting drawers and cupboards, getting dressed. It feels like the middle of the night. István climbs out of bed and pads in his bare feet over the cold bare boards and small rugs to the window. As he does so he can hear Grandpa’s voice at the door of his parents’ room, just a rumble, no words. He lifts the curtain and peeps out.

  There is a heavy blanket of snow over everything. Even the edges of the Danube are frozen, and snow lies on top of the ice, so that it is difficult to tell where the garden ends and the river begins. The night is not quite as dark as he thought when the curtain was drawn. There is a thin crescent of new moon, casting a faint silvery light over the snow, and István makes a quick wish: Please may I get skates for Christmas? It is only two weeks till Christmas. Will God have time?