As each successive August day crept by he wrote three letters to Adrienne telling her of his yearning, his love and his desire, nothing else. He said nothing to her, not a word, not a hint, of his plan to break with his mother whatever the doctor might say. He had decided to tell her only after it had already been done.
August drew to a close. It was already September and a week passed before there was any news. Then, after the long tedious days of waiting, a letter from Adrienne at last arrived, even more laconic than before, her words tinged with a new sadness – Uzdy’s condition had perhaps improved somewhat, Dr Kisch had stated, but not enough for him to be exposed to any emotional excitement. They would have to wait! Always wait! Wait!
The next day Balint went home to Transylvania. The time had come for him to act.
Early in the afternoon Roza Abady was sitting at her desk in the yellow drawing-room at Denestornya. For once she was alone. The bright sunlight outside was reflected in a myriad little points of light on the gilt bronze decorations of the furniture and lit up bright carmine spots on the red carpet.
The door opened and her son came in. He was paler than usual.
Countess Roza looked up, sitting very still. Then she too turned pale because she saw in his face that the moment she had dreaded for the past few weeks had now come. Her clear eyes looked at her son with cold determination.
For a moment neither of them spoke. Then, still standing, his voice hoarse from emotion, Balint said, ‘I have to tell you, Mother, that I have decided to go ahead with the marriage I have already spoken to you about. This is why I have come … to tell you. I cannot go on like this, I have no choice.’
Roza Abady hardly moved except almost imperceptibly to stiffen the backbone in that small plump body. Sitting rigidly in her throne-like chair, she was like an old monarch dispensing justice, calm but unforgiving.
‘I have told you my view,’ she said. ‘You have made your choice, so there is nothing more to say.’
Her lips parted as if she would have liked to add something more; but she was unable to say another word. Then she lifted her arm, one finger pointing implacably towards the door.
Balint too would have liked to have said something, but he was too moved to speak. He bowed deeply and then walked slowly out of the room.
Gently he closed the door behind him and started to descend the stairs until he felt so giddy that he had to stop for a moment and steady himself on the baroque stone balusters. He was relieved that there was no one there to see him as he made his way to his room on the ground floor of one of the round towers. There he picked up his travelling bag, which he had packed just before going to see his mother, and took a last look round that beloved room, gazing for a brief moment through the window to that wonderful view over the park. How many times he had stood there never once realizing that the day would come when he would have to say goodbye! Then he turned away abruptly, crossed the hall and went down the shallow steps to the main entrance.
He got swiftly into his car which was already waiting and told the driver to drive to Kolozsvar. As they rumbled out across the great horseshoe court, Balint looked back just once, as they passed under the arch above which the stone Atlas bore the weight of the world upon his shoulders.
It was five days since Balint had come home to Denestornya and he had passed them in bidding a sad farewell to his beloved home. He went all over the castle, looking into all the rooms except his mother’s own suite.
In the big drawing-room on the first floor he caressed the four lead statues by Raphael Donner which graced the mirrored console tables and gazed at the pair of Chinese lacquer commodes which stood on each side of the doorway. Lightly he touched the elaborate rococo frame of the portrait of that Count Abady who had been Master of the Horse to the King, and let his eyes range over the tiers of old leather-bound volumes in the library. In the smoking room he looked intently at the faces of all those painted ancestors and in the old nursery he started the wall clock which once had made him laugh so much each time the cord was pulled and two tin frogs jumped out and started a battle which never seemed to come to an end.
Wherever he went there was not a room, not a sudden twist on a stair, not a piece of furniture that did not have for him a wealth of secret childhood memories.
He had walked down to the avenue of lime-trees where he had learned to ride, and felt the now ancient bark of the tree-trunk at which his first pony had so often shied and thrown him. He walked through the pine woods in the upper part of the park and wandered all over the Nagyberek – the Big Wood – that island where all alone during the summer holidays from his school in Vienna he had come to play Cowboys and Indians (he, of course, was always an Indian), Leather Jerkin and the Mohicans, and sometimes even dashing Hungarian hussars bent on some daredevil adventure.
In the paddocks he had fed sugar to the mares and patted their wide-eyed offspring that followed so closely behind. One by one he caressed his own horses and said to them a silent farewell. He tried to leave nothing out, for who knew that it might not be the last time that he would ever set eyes on everything that had always been most dear to him – until he had met Adrienne.
Who could tell if his mother would ever relent and forgive? And if she did not, might she not decide to leave Denestornya away from the family, thereby disinheriting him for ever? Balint remembered well the instructions that his dying father had written to guide his young widow in running the place after his death. In that thick copy-book in which Tamas Abady had also inscribed exactly how he had wanted his son brought up, there was a sinister paragraph in which the dying man had specified that if the eight-year-old boy did not survive, and if the widow did not remarry, she was not to will the lands and the Abady fortune to distant relatives but rather give it to some worthy foundation such as the University of Nagyenyed, in some fashion which would preserve the name of Abady.
He had been told this several times by his mother. He did not really believe that this was what she would now do, but it was by no means impossible, for he knew how implacable she could be once her mind was made up. Now that she had been deeply hurt, her anger might lead her to interpret her late husband’s instructions in just such an unforgiving fashion. It was for this reason that he had said his goodbyes before he told his mother that he was going ahead with his plans to marry Adrienne.
Now that he was leaving the sense of loss and the pain of farewell were doubly poignant. The car was moving swiftly to the east along the crest above the village. Below him he could see the church and the square block of his grandfather’s old manor-house. Beside them the giant trees of the park stretched out towards the plain. There too was the winding course of the Aranyos river, the great wheat-fields to the west and the gallops where they had trained the young horses. Then, all of a sudden, they had turned a corner and everything was lost to sight. A few moments later they had descended towards the Keresztes meadows and from there the car sped onwards to the north.
Then, briefly, the great castle could be seen again, immutable and ageless on its slight elevation above the plain-lands, the long western wing golden in the afternoon sunlight, the copper roofs of the sturdy corner towers glinting green against the blue sky. He could even see the veranda where he used to breakfast with his mother. Balint had hardly taken it all in when the vision disappeared once again, shrouded from his view by the intervening trees. For a while longer the roofs and the towers could still be seen etched solid above the sea of green leaves but soon they grew ever more distant, further and further away, until at last for ever unattainable.
Even so Balint still looked back. With death in his heart it was like gazing into some deeply loved face he would never see again.
Now they were driving through the street of little houses which was the village of Gyeres. Denestornya might have been a thousand miles away.
Chapter Four
THE RAIN FELL STEADILY, sometimes more and sometimes less, but it never stopped.
Abady had come up to
the mountains three days before.
When he had so painfully torn himself away from home he had had only one idea: to see Adrienne. Accordingly, after packing up all his things at the Abady house in Kolozsvar, he had driven to the forests near Hunyad. He had left the car at the top of the ridge and come down alone and on foot; and there it was that they met, in the little cabin that Balint had built, and had spent just a brief hour or two together, for Adrienne could never get away for longer, and there they had sheltered together against the insistent rain and against the whole world.
When Adrienne had gone back to Almasko Balint had not known what to do nor where to go. After all the storms of the last few days he longed for peace and solitude. He needed time and quiet to concentrate all his thoughts and decide what he would do next; so he had come up to the high mountains where the could be alone, and there, too, he would be close enough to get news quickly from Adrienne if she too came to a decision.
‘Honey’ Andras Zutor had soon found horses and a baggage wagon, the saddle-ponies were already at Skrind with the gornyiks, and Balint’s tent was brought up the next day from Beles.
They went straight up to Balint’s favourite camping site on the highest slopes of the Prislop.
There was something essentially soothing in the quietly drizzling rain which seemed like a silken veil whose function was to soften the harsh outlines of reality. Through its barely visible threads one could only just make out the saffron leaves of the maple trees or the green of the other deciduous trees whose colour had not yet started to turn. Here and there was a group of hawthorns or a wild plum which had already acquired a faint blush-like tint, and the low hanging branches of the nearby pines were shining brightly as if lacquered.
Everywhere there was silence apart from the soft murmur of the raindrops on the canvas roof of the tent. No birds sang, neither the kingfishers’ tiny piping, nor the songs of blackbirds or mountain jays; the birds of prey no longer called hoarsely to each other and at night even the owls were keeping their own counsel. Everywhere there was silence, as of infinity or death.
Balint barely moved from his tent. He who was usually so passionately interested in everything that lived or grew or moved on the mountain now lay passively on his trestle bed doing nothing and seeing nothing. Even when Honey brought in his reports, Balint hardly seemed to notice his presence. Not even the news that the dishonest notary Simo had now gone too far in his oppression and abuse of the people of the mountain brought any definite reaction from Balint. The information that Honey brought was enough, if brought out into the open, to have Simo dismissed – which would automatically have freed the peasants from his tyranny and acquisitive ways. It was a complicated matter of a tax-fraud; but fraud there had been and if Balint had stood by the oppressed and demanded a full-scale investigation from the county magistrates, the problem of Simo would have been settled once and for all. At any other time Balint would have been fired with zeal to put matters to rights and he would have rushed to the aid of those poor mountain people, at once planning a line of attack and the best way of doing good for others. Now he just read the report and then put it away in his knapsack, deciding nothing except perhaps that he would look at it some other time.
Some of the day he would sit at the door of the tent, gazing out in front of him but seeing nothing but the images of Denestornya … and of Adrienne … and thinking of nothing but them.
How wide her eyes had opened when he told her that he had broken with his mother! And how scared she had looked! ‘You really did that?’ she had said. ‘You did that terrible thing?’ And he realized that Adrienne had been frightened because she knew at once what a great burden this placed on her, she for whom the sacrifice had been made. And Balint had not spared her when he told the tale. He had underlined everything, cruelly repeating his mother’s words, and his own, consciously doing it (though hating himself for it), so that she would feel obliged, at last, to break with her husband.
With her mouth she had given him her kisses and she had held him tightly in her arms as she had given her body to him for consolation, but she had known then that this was not enough and that she could no longer repay him with caresses but only with her whole life; and diamond tears had glistened on her long, dark lashes.
Later, when it was already long after noon, the clouds lifted slightly and the rain slackened.
On the old hornbeam tree opposite Balint’s tent, two blue-tits started to chatter, chirping merrily as they flew from branch to branch. Somewhere a siskin could be heard and below the little camp the rushing of the stream was now louder than the rain, though before there had seemed to be a universal silence. From the bed of the valley little streams of vapour started to rise and float lightly on the hill-slopes. Very slowly the weather cleared.
The man in the tent saw little of this. His thoughts were still in the recent past and his heart was bitter.
Always he had assumed that it was certain what would happen when he told Adrienne of what he had done for her. He had known that naturally then she really would make up her mind, accept what he had done for her and publicly tell everyone that she was suing for divorce. But it had not happened like that at all, and perhaps it never would happen. What had she said? ‘I can’t do it yet!’ she had cried. ‘It’s impossible! It’s horrible, but I still can’t do it! I can’t!’ And she had gone on repeating, over and over, ‘I can’t! I can’t!’ There was despair in her voice, but that was what she had said. And she had told him again how the doctor had said that any sudden shock would have a terrible effect on her husband. If she demanded a divorce now it could provoke no one knew what awful reaction. It was a terrible responsibility and she alone must carry it. It was she who was responsible, responsible for everyone. Then she had added those words she had not known would hurt him the most: ‘And then there’s my daughter’.
And so they had parted once again, agreeing to wait, as they had before. The parting was agony for both of them, for even though it was not a final goodbye, neither knew when or how they might meet again, if ever, nor whether there was still any hope for a future life together. All was uncertain. A promise lay between them; but could it ever be fulfilled?
‘I’ll write, as soon as I can. I’ll think of a way … I’ll do everything in my power,’ she promised.
And again her long dark lashes were wet with tears and there was despair in her eyes as she walked away.
Now the mists were fast disappearing, leaving only a few wisps to hide the tops of the very tallest trees. A light breeze stirred in the valley, so light that though the leaves began to rustle the men in the meadow could hardly feel it.
Balint was still wrapped in his dismal thoughts. Why, he asked himself, was it so impossible for Adrienne to breach the subject of divorce? He knew that she was not afraid for her own life or safety, nor especially for his, for had they not courted disaster night after night spent in each others’ arms in Uzdy’s house where Uzdy himself might at any hour suddenly and unexpectedly return from the country? Then they had played with death with no thoughts for their safety. What, therefore, could be this dreadful obstacle today?
No matter how hard he fretted he could not find any better answer than that Adrienne must be determined to have her daughter with her, which would be impossible if Uzdy disputed the divorce. It was those words ‘And then there’s my daughter!’ Didn’t they prove what was in her mind? Subconsciously he felt that this explanation was wrong, and yet he could find nothing better to replace it. There couldn’t be any other reason … There wasn’t any other reason…
Dusk began to fall and with it the sunset began to cast a faint rosy glow on the mist covering the distant mountains.
Balint, still wrapped in his own dismal thoughts, did not notice it, but the calm of the forest evening was suddenly broken by a deep booming sound. Immediately, from the log cabin where the foresters lodged, two men came out and made their way down to Abady’s tent. They were Honey Andras Zutor and old Zsukuczo, who guarded
the forests on the slope of the Gyalu Botin and who, though now the head game-warden of the district, had once been a famous poacher.
Together they hurried towards the younger man.
‘A stag is calling,’ said Honey. The old man said the same thing in Romanian: ‘Striga taur’. And they both pointed to the right where the summit of the Munchel Mare would have been visible but for the mist which covered it.
Balint jumped up. Motionless, the three men listened. For a few minutes there was nothing to be heard. Then again the deep organ-like call boomed out, as powerful as a lion’s roar.
‘Raincoat! Telescope! A hat!’ said Abady, as he picked up his Mannlicher sporting rifle, not that he had any particular desire to shoot anything, but in those days no one walked the mountains without a gun on his shoulder. When all was ready they walked swiftly and noiselessly; the ground was so sodden that neither leaves nor fallen branches snapped beneath their feet. They followed the track that led to the high watershed of the range and there they stopped briefly until the stag called again. This time he called twice, bravely and boldly, and the sound seemed to come from the right of where they stood.
‘He’s going towards the Burnt Rock,’ whispered the old poacher who may have had poor sight and red-rimmed eyes from too high a consumption of brandy but whose hearing was as sharp as a lynx’s. ‘That’s where he’s going, for sure,’ and the stag, as if to confirm what he said, called again exactly from the direction the old man had indicated.
They Were Found Wanting (Writing on the Wall: The Transylvania Trilogy) Page 56
