by Ann Swinfen
Meeting Tom, whose affection was easy-going though not passionate, had been a means of escape. Slowly gaining self-confidence during the early years of her marriage, she began to think that perhaps it was something amiss not in her but in Millicent which made their relationship so strained. Her mother was constantly critical, always eager to point out Kate’s faults both in deed and in character, yet whenever her daughter tried to turn to deeper issues, a steel shutter seemed to clamp down between them.
There was an owl nesting in the walnut tree in the village square. Kate had heard it before. Now she saw it for the first time, leaving the tree on silent wings, then – as it soared towards the fields beyond the village – unable to restrain its wavering, desolate hunting cry. Kate shivered and thought of the creatures in the fields, mice and young rabbits and voles, crouching amongst the tinder-dry stems, their hearts pounding with fear. Not wanting to see the owl return clutching its prey, she padded softly across the room to the other window. It must face not due north, but north-east, she realised, for the rising moon shone in slantwise on her here, lighting up her white nightdress so that it shone spectrally. She lifted her hand and saw it blue-white, insubstantial, floating.
István and Magdolna, on the other hand, had scarcely known their parents. István said he could just remember Zsigmond Niklai, but Magdolna had been a baby when their father had been seized by the secret police and carried away to what terrible pain and death Kate could not bear to contemplate. She thought of Zsigmond in the photograph, standing on the steps of the summer-house, and her own momentary sense that she had seen him again. Of course, she could understand it now. István did look quite like his father, even though Zsigmond, in that photograph, had been no older than his late thirties while István must be near fifty. And although Magdolna had no memory of her father, she had been ten when her mother had faced the firing squad. How could you live with a memory like that? What did it do to a ten-year-old girl, or to a twelve-year-old boy?
Kate thought she could begin to understand, now, the source of the passion which vibrated in Magdolna’s work. And István? She supposed his work as a doctor was a channel for the same passions. Magdolna, of course, had the support of a strong and happy marriage, and two children who were growing up in a world transformed from the world of the Rudnay children’s youth. She wondered whether István had ever married.
There was no light shining in the Buvaris’ house. József would rise early in the morning, like any farmer, and no doubt his family rose with him. The moon shimmered on the Danube and she could see the house as a sharp-cut silhouette standing out against the silver water. To the left she could just make out the corner of the barn, which she had previously taken to be an odd angle of the house. Now she knew it was Magdolna’s studio. Once truly a barn, it had been partially converted by her grandfather, the village potter whom Sofia had known. It was this grandfather, they had learned, who had started to train Magdolna when she was a young girl, before she went to college and then on to study under the famous Margit Kovacs. When Magdolna had taken over the whole barn for her expanding needs, József had been given the use of a barn on his parents’ old farm, now occupied by Imre – he of the sprinkler system and other, wilder, inventions, which they had heard about, hilariously, towards the end of the evening.
István had steered the conversation that way, Kate now realised. Once he had revealed the family relationship he had done everything he could to ease the shock for Sofia. Yet the curious thing was that Sofia did not seem shocked. She had spoken no more than the truth when she said that she had already known that István and Magdolna were her brother and sister.
‘Something compelled me to come back to Szentmargit,’ she said calmly. ‘Do you believe in telepathy? I’m not sure that I do, but sometimes there seems to be something.’
‘I think we all have experiences we can’t explain,’ said Kate. ‘Sometimes I dream of a friend I haven’t thought of for months, and then two or three days later I’ll get a letter from her.’
‘Exactly. Why should Magdolna have found the tin box of papers at much the same time as I decided I must open my mother’s old trunk and force myself to confront the past? Something between us, perhaps? A telepathy between sisters? Yet although you knew of my existence, I didn’t know of yours.’
‘Some people would say it was predestination,’ said István slowly. ‘But do I believe in that? I’m not sure. A religious man would say it was the will of God.’
‘Perhaps it was,’ said Magdolna quietly.
‘But you do not believe in God,’ said István.
‘Just because I don’t believe in Him doesn’t mean He doesn’t exist,’ she said serenely.
Kate smiled across the table at her. She was beginning to like Magdolna very much. She could see that, like Sofia, Magdolna combined passion with a kind of dignity and self-knowledge that Kate wished she possessed herself.
She had been nearly sleep-walking when István and József had accompanied them home to the Blue Heron, but after she had showered and changed into her nightdress she had found herself suddenly wakeful, going over and over the events of the extraordinary evening in her mind.
Zsigmond Niklai had slipped away from the manor of Szentmargit at the outset of war, abandoning his paintings, his silver, all his possessions, and joined the partisans in the forest, fighting for a Hungary free of Nazis, a Hungary where Hungarians could live in peace and democracy. Kate wished he had lived to see it achieved. It was through the spirit of men like Zsigmond that the hope had been passed down to the young people who had risen so bravely, so forlornly, for freedom, eight years after he had been taken away by night from the rose-red house beside the river.
I am ashamed, thought Kate. Sickened and ashamed that Britain and the other Western nations did nothing to support the 1956 uprising, started by students, taken up by ordinary men and women, and in the end even the army itself. In her teens she had heard the recording of those desperate appeals put out on the radio, finally falling into silence, and had felt guilty. But never before had she realised what it really meant. Young mothers like Juliska – who had been thirty-two – lined up against a wall and shot.
‘They threw children into prison,’ said István, ‘but it was against the law to execute anyone under the age of eighteen. So the puppet government of Russia was very punctilious, very correct. They kept the children of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen in prison until they were eighteen. And then they executed them.’
How could you live with memories like that?
Kate longed to put her arms around them both, she ached so with sympathy, but they seemed to accept what had been done to them and to their parents. It was this suppressed agony of mind in herself, this yearning to touch, to embrace, out of sheer fellow human feeling, which kept her restlessly awake.
A picture kept coming back into her mind of Zsigmond and Juliska in the forest near the end of the war. Magdolna had brought out a photograph of the two of them in camouflage trousers and heavy boots, laughing under the trees, with their arms around each other. They looked radiant. Juliska was wearing a peaked cap, pushed over at a jaunty angle on her dark, unkempt curls. You would have thought they were larking about on a picnic, not living on the edge of danger, with death threatening at any moment. István said that for years he had had to keep his copy of the photograph hidden, because his parents’ faces were known to the Ávó, and if he had been seen displaying it he would have fallen under suspicion. Sofia took the photograph and looked at it searchingly, then she handed it back to Magdolna, wiping her eyes.
‘I am sorry,’ said Magdolna, contrite. ‘I have distressed you.’
‘No, no. I am glad Juliska was able to give him such happiness. She was even younger than I, did you know that? And what makes me sad is that by the time that photograph was taken, they could have married. My mother died in 1944.’
Magdolna was silent, then, thinking about it.
‘I don’t know that it mattered very much to the
m,’ she said at last. ‘In the world in which they lived, such formalities must have seemed of small importance. We minded, István and I, when the other children called us bastards. But in the end we were accepted.’
‘They had us both christened, though,’ said István thoughtfully, ‘so they did care for the sacraments of the Church.’
He told them of his parents’ twenty-kilometre walk to the village, two days after his birth, and his secret christening by night in the Church of Szent Margit across the square from the csárda.
‘The next night they walked back again to the partisan camp in the forest.’
‘Poor little Juliska,’ Sofia murmured, thinking of the black-haired child with the jug.
‘No,’ said István. ‘She had become a very strong woman, very brave.’ He took a deep breath. ‘It was known amongst those of the partisans still working against the Russians after the war that my father had been betrayed by a former comrade. It was our mother who carried out the execution, in the flower market in Györ.’
Kate stared at him. She remembered the buckets of gladioli and carnations, the young man with the red roses. Magdolna was looking down, pleating the embroidered tablecloth between her fingers. István had only told her about his visit to Ferenc Kalla the evening before.
‘You have to understand,’ she said, clearing her throat, ‘that in those times it was not possible to be an ordinary wife and mother. Not for those who believed in the struggle for freedom. Hungary always had to come first – before family, before friends, before personal wishes, before life itself. By doing what she did, she helped to start the changes which meant, in the end, that I could be a mother to my children, and a wife to József. That I could work in peace on my art, instead of being called upon to give my life for my principles.’
How could you live with a memory like that?
Kate shivered, standing in her thin nightdress, looking out over the silvered breadth of the Danube and the small, unpretentious house which held so much passion and pain. She climbed back into bed, huddling under the feather bed, clutching it around her for comfort, but she went on shivering.
* * *
Sofia, lying quietly on her back with her hands clasped in front of her, heard Kate moving about in the room above her. The conversation of the evening played itself over in her mind, with its moments of sharp grief and regret. Yet her abiding feeling was one of calm. She had come back to Hungary partly looking for answers, partly to ease the burden of memory. She had her answers now. Her father had survived the war, only to die at the hands of the secret police some time afterwards – and she would never know exactly when. Yet she felt less grief at this than she had expected. It had been clear to her for some time now that Zsigmond must have died long ago. Otherwise, as relations between Hungary and the West improved after the end of the Stalinist regime, he would have found some way of contacting her.
His abandonment of his position as a landowner – which could have meant power and privilege under the Horthy government – seemed a natural progression in his life, starting with his liberal land reforms and gift of land to the Szentmargit peasants and continuing with his outspoken newspaper articles in the national press condemning the rise of the Arrow Cross, before censorship had silenced him. His involvement with the partisan movement was the only way he could have gone, and remained true to his principles, after Hitler had tricked and betrayed Hungary out of neutrality into the war.
It was strange to think of Juliska – whom she still thought of as the barefoot little village girl – living with Zsigmond in the rough world of the partisan camp in the forest, but oddly she did not resent it. She had spoken the simple truth when she had said that she was glad Juliska had brought him happiness. Her sense of guilt – that she had escaped and survived, while her father had been left behind to face danger and death – was a little eased by the thought of that joyous photograph of Juliska and Zsigmond, and by the existence of Magdolna and István, sprung from that love. A brother and sister – this indeed was not what she had expected to find in coming on this pilgrimage to Szentmargit.
And in thinking over her father’s relationship with the village, she understood a little better her own past, and her mother’s. The villagers had always looked somewhat askance at Eva. Despite her fame as a musician, despite her beauty and charm, they had resented her half-gypsy blood. A gypsy as Countess Niklai was an insult to the descendants of those who had served the ancient, aristocratic Hungarian family. She realised, now, that Eva had kept her daughter from contact with the village children as much to protect her as out of a sense of social superiority. When Sofia had been taken for the Paparuda, she had been taken as a punishment. That ceremony was an ancient survival of a ritual to propitiate the gods, and the gypsy girl was the sacrifice – made to bow her head before the will of the peasants, made to suffer so that their fields might flourish.
Sofia had never told her parents that she had been used for the Paparuda. Instinctively she must have known even then that to be stripped naked and paraded by the villagers was a humiliation of their daughter that not even her father would have tolerated from his people. Yet she had not felt humiliated. She had not felt like a victim. She closed her eyes now and summoned back the experience which had come upon her so suddenly this afternoon on seeing the dolphin jug again, made by Magdolna’s grandfather, carried by Magdolna’s mother. No, she remembered clearly that she had felt exalted by the experience, as if she had somehow managed to reach out and touch for a moment a secret world which she knew lay just behind the curtain of everyday life. She had run home that hot summer afternoon when she was ten, dressed again in her cotton frock but with Danube water dripping from her hair, and for the first time in her life she had tried to write a poem. She had torn it up, because it was a poor thing, but she knew now, looking back, that it was at that moment she became a poet.
Later that night, she had woken to a crash of thunder. Standing at the window of her room in the manor house she had seen lightning play about the village and heard the rain falling in torrents on the dry and thirsty earth, and she knew that it had been her doing, her gift as the Paparuda. She had broken the drought.
As they were about to leave the Buvaris’ house this evening, having cleared the dishes from the table under the vine, lingering on the threshold, all of them reluctant to say good-night, Sofia had turned to István.
‘When we left here, my mother and I, we had to leave my dog Bárat behind. He knew I was betraying him, and howled his heart out. I don’t suppose you know what became of him? Did my – our – father keep him?’
István smiled. ‘Old Bárat? He lived until I was five or six. Magdolna and I both learned to walk clutching on to his fur. Come.’
He took hold of her hand and led her, stumbling a little in the dark, to the apple tree at the edge of the garden. He guided her fingers until they touched a small wooden grave marker, a miniature of those in the churchyard.
‘He is buried here. My grandfather carved the grave marker for him.’
Sofia gave a sudden dry sob as her fingers traced the carving.
‘Hush,’ said István, putting his arms around her and holding her. ‘He had a good life, I promise you. And we loved him.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sofia. ‘It has been a strange and wonderful evening.’
‘Yes,’ he said, leading her back with his arm around her shoulders. ‘Strange and wonderful. Sad, but also happy.’
* * *
István, unable to sleep, had gone out again after Magdolna and József had retired to bed. For a while he sat on the bench against the wall of the house and heard the soft murmuring of their voices fade away into sleep. But he was restless, and set off along the path beside the river where he had walked with Kate that afternoon. He had known it all his life and could have walked it on a moonless night without difficulty, skirting the holes where the bank had collapsed and stepping over straggling tree-roots by instinct. But tonight the moon, though not full, was clear
and unclouded, and the countryside lay around him like a mysterious black and silver painting. He could hear the steady flow of the Danube at his side, a sound as familiar as the pulse of his own blood. He was aware of it only at such times as this, walking at night, undistracted by people or the busy sounds from the fields. There was a soft murmur from the branches of the willows overhead, stirring in the faint breeze, but otherwise there was silence except for the sound of an owl, hunting over the fields. The ground at his feet was dusty from the long drought, and the bushes beside the path gave off a dry, peppery scent as he brushed past them.
On the wooden bridge over the trout stream he paused, and leaned on the slender handrail, looking down at the water flowing beneath his feet. Here it met the Danube in a swirl of foam and sudden excited eddies, as if it knew it was now mingling with the great river which ran all through the heart of central Europe, to flow at last into the Black Sea. And from there, thought István, to the Mediterranean, and from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, which mingles with the North Sea, where Kate and Sofia live beside the shore. He was taken again with that vision of his childhood, of climbing into a boat and setting sail on the Danube, on and on till the ends of the earth.
It had been, as Sofia said, a strange and wonderful evening.
He wished he had a cigarette. He had given up smoking ten years ago, and never regretted it, but now he felt he needed a cigarette.
Although he had always known of Sofia’s existence, it had had no reality for him. To be confronted with the reality was deeply unsettling. It had also been a new discovery that his half-sister Sofia was Sofia Tabor, whose poetry he had read. Thinking of the poems, and the woman, and the lives of all his family, he felt as though the fragments of a jigsaw, scattered and lost years ago, were beginning to come together.
