They Were Found Wanting (Writing on the Wall: The Transylvania Trilogy)

by Bánffy, Miklós

  ‘On our side?’

  ‘No! No! The shot came from the village common land. I was standing in front of my house and heard it all quite clearly. And I can tell you I didn’t move for a few minutes either!’

  The old man laughed again, snapping a twig between his fingers before throwing it aside. Then he went on, ‘I don’t care what happens outside our land. Besides it’s better not to know too much. Still I looked into it a bit later, just to be sure.’ And he went on to give all the details, speaking slowly, as country folk do, especially in the mountains where people rarely finish a sentence.

  It seems that he saw the hated notary ride by his house. Then there was the sound of a shot. Half an hour later he went to see what he could find. There was no one about and it was clear that whoever had fired had missed his target. As an ex-poacher who could read any sign or trace left it was easy for old Zsukuczo to reconstruct what had happened. There, in the mud of the path, he could see how Simo had suddenly and sharply reined back his horse – so sharply indeed that the animal had almost fallen backwards on its rump. ‘Next I looked to see if they wanted to give him a good scare, or whether …’ Soon he found what he was looking for, a rifle bullet, lodged in a tree-trunk just beside the skid-marks. The shot had come from somewhere on the steep hillside above the path, from the cover of a group of young beech trees. Whoever the marksman had been, he was good shot, that was clear enough even if he had not actually hit the target. The old man again laughed and then, as if to show his appreciation of a good joke, spat in a wide arc.

  ‘So ever since that day Mr Simo always makes a sort of detour so that no one can guess where he’s going, yes?’ said young Kula.

  ‘And ever since that day he also carries a revolver!’ said Krisan, and they all laughed in quiet mockery.

  ‘Hasn’t he made any official enquiry then?’ asked Honey.

  Todor Paven, the tall man from the Humpleu, replied, ‘Heavens no! Even he knows such things can never be cleared up properly. People say he’s never even mentioned it.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have been no loss!’ muttered young Kula.

  Then Honey, whose part in the conversation had until now been merely to ask questions while quietly sucking on his pipe, spoke up harshly. ‘No more of that in front of me, my lad! Time we moved on. Get up, all of you!’ and himself rose to his feet and started to walk away.

  Meekly the other men gathered their things together, brought up the horses, and moved off in the wake of their leader.

  Balint stayed where he was for quite some time as he would not have liked any of them to know that he had been listening to them. Only when they were already some distance away did he too start to follow. As it happened this precaution was quite unnecessary for his path turned sharply up the mountain-side and rejoined the other only at the ridge just before they all arrived back at the camp.

  When Balint had finished his supper he called Andras Zutor into his tent, told him that by chance he had overheard the conversation in the meadow and asked him what it was all about and what had happened to lead up to such a situation. Zutor now knew his master better than he had two years before at the time the money-lender Rusz Pantyilimon had been murdered one dark snowbound night and when red-hot pincers would not have drawn any answers from him. Now he answered quite freely. It seemed that the extortionate money-lending had not been stopped by Rusz’s death. Now there was not one but two such loan-sharks operating in the mountain villages, one at Meregyo and another at Rogosel. Both worked in the same way as had Rusz. The Romanian popa Timbus, the priest from Gyurkuca, was still the local representative of the Union Bank, and it was still he who arranged the loans for those in need. The notary Simo continued to prepare the contracts and the written contracts continued to contain clauses which had not been explained to the borrowers, most of whom could neither read nor write. Everything Simo did was for the benefit only of the lenders.

  Abady then interrupted, ‘Surely that’s impossible to prove. No one will bear witness against the village priest, we saw that two years ago. Has Simo himself done anything illegal, anything we can prove?’

  ‘Plenty! There’s not a contract written he doesn’t benefit from. That’s why he never asked for an enquiry into the shooting. He’d have had to tell the county sheriff, who’s a good friend of his, and he couldn’t do that and be sure the enquiry didn’t find out something of what was going on.’

  Balint thought deeply, the instinct to help others, which was so strongly embedded in him, was aroused once again. He must do something to get that thieving notary off the people’s backs. However he realized that he would now have to work out some approach more shrewdly and subtly than he had at the time of the outcry against Rusz Pantyilimon and the popa Timbus when the men of Pejkoja had come to him for help but turned to secret violence when the priest had threatened them.

  ‘Listen, friend Zutor,’ said Balint quietly. ‘Could you find me some documents on these transactions, very discreetly, of course, so that no one notices?’

  ‘I could try, my Lord,’ said Zutor, somewhat on his dignity.

  ‘But don’t tell my manager Winckler, or anyone else!’

  Zutor’s eyes sparkled, ‘You can be sure of that, my Lord. No one but your Lordship!’

  ‘Make some notes for me, and when I next come up we’ll go through them together and see what we can use.’

  ‘It shall be done, my Lord!’ said Zutor quietly.

  Balint got up and the forester clicked his heels as if about to take his leave. Abady, however, gestured to him to stay for a moment. ‘One other thing! This afternoon Mr Simo suggested that when we decided to have another drive against the cattle he should provide some gendarmes who would go on ahead and confiscate the horns which warned the cattle. It seems a good idea and so I may tell Mr Winckler to co-operate with him. This does not affect what I’ve just asked you to do.’

  ‘I understand, my Lord!’

  Zutor saluted his master and left the tent. Balint watched as his powerful stocky figure stumped off in the moonlight. Honey was barrel-chested and he walked proudly on his short legs, marching away as befitted a former non-commissioned officer who had reached the rank of Master-at-Arms during his service with the Hussars.

  Two weeks later Winckler’s report reached Abady at Denestornya:

  Mr Notary Simo, as agreed by your Lordship, sent up a detachment of gendarmes on Thursday. Two went through the Ponor to the south ridge and two to the north from Vale Boului. I myself left Beles after dark and by Friday morning the foot of the Intreapa was closed by our party of sixteen gornyiks and gendarmes. When the fog lifted I searched the valley with my binoculars and to my great surprise there wasn’t a head of cattle to be seen. Nevertheless we beat the whole valley hoping that there might be some stray beasts still hidden in those parcels of undergrowth not yet cleared. Our search was vain; there was nothing at all to be found on your Lordship’s land, even though everywhere we saw fresh tracks and droppings so that anyone could tell the whole herd had been there and been driven away only late the previous evening.

  The damage was appalling: seventy-eight per cent of the young trees have been destroyed. Though the law says that the estate must replant immediately I cannot advise this until the culprits have been seized and punished and until we can be sure it won’t happen again. The enormous expense would otherwise be wasted. It seems that the gendarmes returned there on Saturday but once again they found nothing there.

  It is clear that the villagers were warned, again at the last minute, but I have no idea who could have betrayed our intentions. Surely not one of our own men? Anyhow even they did not know our plans until the last minute, and then I took them immediately up into the forests so that not one of them had a chance to speak to anyone else. I do not suspect the gendarmes who are known to be reliable.

  By the same post came a letter from Honey Andras Zutor. He wrote without punctuation, but his meaning was utterly clear. He told the same story, but with certain additions:<
br />
  I don’t think it right or normal if it please your Lordship the notary had two gendarmes with him when he went up the river and on the way went into popa Timbus’s house afterwards coming out and following the gendarmes on horseback until they arrived at the foot of the Ponor where he dismissed them and came back towards Toserat but not the way he come the popa sent his servant for Nyik Vasilika who is rich and lives some way off and he too went somewhere but I don’t know where but it must have been some way as Grunspan the innkeeper at Gyurkuca told me he must have gone a long way as it was already eleven when he returned and went in for a slug of brandy and his boots were covered in mud though it didn’t rain anywhere there except in the mountains and on the Boului we had no rain at all and not in the village either, that the notary visited the popa and the rest was told by one of the gendarmes quite by chance when I asked him why the notary needed an escort and he said it wasn’t an escort because he only left them at their posts and when he went in to see the popa which seems true because I too saw from the Humpleu on the other side of the river that Nyik Vasilika went with the servant to Timbus because I came that way from Skrind hoping to see something as your Lordship told me to keep my eyes open but it was too late to see the notary visit the priest but I saw what I said and it was then seven o’clock and getting dark and as Forest Manager Winckler waited for me at Beles when it got darker I wouldn’t see any more …

  Balint was not at all sorry. As it turned out it was a lucky chance that the operation had still proved fruitless even after he had accepted the notary’s offer of help. Although they were quite within the law to ask for the gendarmes the fact that Simo had himself offered them showed that the notary found himself under an obligation to someone, and by playing this double game and making sure that the trick did not come off he was clearly repaying a debt and was now free of it. But in doing so it was he himself who broke the thin thread of any confidence Abady might still have had in him.

  I wonder why he did it, mused Balint. Why should he betray the plan he himself had suggested?

  There were several possibilities. The offer of help might have been made simply to curry favour with the powerful landowner; Simo was quite adept at this as Balint had seen when he was setting up the co-operative in the mountains. But any display of goodwill coming from him was sure to be false; he hated Abady’s strict management of the forests where the new order had put an end to the illicit deer shoots that he had had with the old and now retired manager Nyiresy. When that old rogue had still been the Abady forest manager they had lived like lords themselves, organizing wild festivities, getting free wood for themselves and others, while ignoring all restraints of law and order. Now Abady had put an end to his life as a little tin god in the mountains and he couldn’t forgive him. Of course there were probably other reasons too, more serious ones that he hardly dared speak of. No doubt, after the shooting and other incidents he was frightened that the mountain people would try to take their revenge on him for helping the money-lenders and the foreclosures. Perhaps, as the whole village was involved in the matter of the illegal grazing, he had felt it wiser to prove he wasn’t totally against them and perhaps felt he would breathe more easily as he went about his business if he did them a good turn for once.

  This at least was Abady’s train of thought. Still, he realized that he had not yet found the answer to the cattle problem. Something else would have to be tried. Perhaps he could go straight to the Prefect of the district and get gendarmes from somewhere not under Simo’s jurisdiction. Maybe that would be the answer …

  Chapter Two

  THE CHURCH BELLS had already started their second peel when Countess Roza and her son walked out from the shade of the north-west tower of the castle of Denestornya and started the short descent which led to the village church. As long as Balint could remember the bells that signalled the time for going to church had always sounded the same. It was that same sound that pealed forth when he had been a child, a schoolboy home from the holidays from the Theresianum, or a young man on leave from his diplomatic posts abroad.

  This weekly attendance at church had become something of a pilgrimage for Countess Roza. She too remembered the familiar sound of the bells from her own childhood when, the spoilt princess of an enchanted domain, she had demurely walked down the same path firstly with her parents, later with her husband, and then for so many widowed years, alone or just with a servant in attendance. And it had been just the same for generations of Abadys before her. The path was paved with ancient pebbles. Every now and then there was a short flight of stone steps, and these were now deeply worn even though it was only folk from the castle who used the path which led to the small door of the cemetery. This was always kept locked, and only they had the key.

  The family never drove to church, no matter how bad the weather. This would have meant a long detour from the castle courtyard, through the home farm and back through the village until eventually they reached the rococo gateway where stood three graceful statues of angels, one holding the Ten Commandments, the second the Abady coat of arms, and the third leaning elegantly on a long trumpet patiently awaiting the order to sound the Last Trump.

  Anyhow, whatever the reason, Countess Abady, who was determined that all the members of her household should also attend church on Sunday, never ordered the carriage on this day.

  Abady stopped for a moment on the edge of the narrow path. He loved to look out from there. Though the gentle hillside was covered with a thick plantation of young pine trees, from this place there was a gap through which one could look out over the rich Keresztes plains towards the distant Torda mountains. Even further off could just be seen the hazy blue outlines of the high ridges of the Jara, while close at hand the sunlight picked out the stone fáade of the old church. Just behind it, half hidden by groups of lime trees and elms, Balint could see the red roofs of the old mansion where his grandfather, Count Peter, had lived; and it was the memories that were brought back by this glimpse that had such an effect today on Balint’s imagination.

  As a boy Balint had often escaped from his tutors and stolen over to visit his grandfather. At that time the pines had still been quite small and Balint would pick his way through their thickly enlaced branches pretending that he was Cooper’s ‘Leather Jerkin’. When he climbed the cemetery wall he would imagine it to be the palisades of a great fort. By the time he had also scaled the wall of his grandfather’s mansion he was often in a thoroughly bedraggled state with torn trousers and filthy stockings. Thinking about it today he could still see the old gentleman, himself the soul of neatness, with a smile on his carefully shaven face and his small pointed moustaches waxed to a fine point, turning in welcome as Balint climbed wearily up to the porticoed terrace.

  After Count Peter’s death Balint’s mother had allowed her agent Azbej to install himself in a few of the rooms and Balint managed to avoid going there as he did not wish to be angered by whatever horrors the common little lawyer might have perpetrated. Perhaps he had even repainted some of the eighteenth-century rooms in garish colours, and Balint did not want to be pained by the sacrilege to his grandfather’s memory.

  Recollecting himself he hurried after his mother who was now some way ahead.

  The church gave the impression of being completely white, both inside and out. The interior walls had been lime-washed and even the ancient benches were as white as constant scrubbing for several centuries could achieve. The floor was covered with great slabs of white limestone. The organ was painted pale grey with its elaborate decorations picked out in faded gilt and the baldachino and the pulpit were of pale carved stone. The ceiling too was painted, each square panel with a different pattern of either flowers or heraldic emblems. These, however, were all so faded that the general impression was one of radiant whiteness, so much so that one hardly noticed that on the ceiling there were tulips and carnations and that here a white hart was drinking from a colourless mountain stream and there an oddly-shaped pelican was feeding its
young with its own blood.

  In the congregation many of the men seemed to be dressed in white too, so snowy were their best linen shirts. Contrasted with them were the principal men of the village – the estate manager, the local sheriff and leading tradespeople and the treasurer of Balint’s new co-operative society. These people, all in dark clothes, sat in the front rows. Black predominated also in the women’s pews for though some of the young women and girls wore multi-coloured head-scarves the older ones who sat in front of them were swathed in black from head to foot. High on the wall behind the choir rail was the tablet showing the numbers of the hymns and psalms to be sung, and this too was painted black. However the most sombre of them all was the priest himself whose voluminous robes were of the darkest hue imaginable, and the old priest himself, as he leaned forward – with his long beak of a nose – over the edge of the pulpit, resembled nothing as much as an old crow in a tree.

  Directly beneath him was the place reserved for the Abady family. Here the benches were also of scrubbed white pine but the book-rest was covered in the same light-green velvet as were the cushions of the pulpit. A Book of Psalms and a Bible were always placed on this rest. Directly behind it sat Balint and his mother. Here the benches formed, with the altar-table, an almost perfect square, the men in front and the girls at one side. The altar was covered with an embroidered cloth, as it always was for the Sunday services, but today, as it was the Feast of the New Bread and there was going to be Holy Communion, it carried also the silver vessels of the Denestornya church plate bearing the bread and wine, and these in their turn were covered by an ancient altar cloth of faded brocade, though the shape of the objects beneath could clearly be distinguished.