“Very few. Very, very few.”
Jessie nodded. “And how do you handle the nosy ones?”
“Some years ago, a young journalist from England came here,” the old woman said,
looking off. “So many questions he had. He was writing something about Hungary
during the war and after.”
“Is that right?” Janson asked, his eyes intent. “I’d love to read what he
wrote.”
The crone snorted. “He never wrote anything. Just a couple of days after his
visit, he was killed in an accident in Budapest. The accident rates are terrible
there, everyone says so.”
The temperature seemed to drop in the room as she spoke.
“But I always wondered,” the old woman said.
“He ask about this count, too?” Jessie prompted.
“Have another chestnut,” the old woman said.
“Could I really? You don’t mind?”
The old woman nodded, pleased. After a while she said, “He was our count. You
could not live in Molnar and not know the count. The land you worked was his
land, or once had been. One of the very old families—he traced his ancestry back
to one of the seven tribes that formed the Hungarian nation in the year 1000.
His ancestral estate was here, even though he spent a great deal of time in the
capital.” She lifted her small dark eyes toward the ceiling. “They say I am an
old woman who lives in the past. Perhaps it is so. Such a troubled land we lived
in. Ferenczi-Novak understood that better than most.”
“Did he, now?” Jessie said.
She regarded her quietly for a moment. “Perhaps you will join me in a small
glass of pálinka.”
“I’m fine, ma’am.”
Gitta Békesi stared ahead stonily and said nothing, evidently offended.
Jessie looked at Janson and then back at the old woman. “Well, if you’re having
some.”
The old woman slowly rose and walked unsteadily to the glass-front sideboard.
There, she lifted an enormous jug filled with a colorless liquid, and poured a
small quantity into two shot glasses.
Jessie took one. The old woman settled back into her chair and watched as Jessie
had a sip.
Explosively, she sprayed the liquid out. It was as involuntary as a sneeze.
“Jeez, I’m sorry!” she got out in a strangled voice.
The old woman smiled mischievously.
Jessie was still struggling for breath. “What the … ” Jessie gasped, her eyes
watering.
“Around here, we make it ourselves,” the woman said. “A hundred and ninety
proof. A bit stiff for you?”
“Little bit,” Jessie said hoarsely.
The old woman swallowed the rest of the brandy, and looked more relaxed than she
had been. “It all goes back to the Treaty of Trianon, in 1920, and the lost
territories. We had to give up almost three-quarters of our land to the
Romanians and the Yugoslavs. Can you imagine what that felt like?”
“Like an amputation,” Janson offered.
“That’s it—there was a ghostly sense that a part of you was there and yet not
there. Nem, nem soha! It was the national motto, and it means ‘No, no never.’ It
is the answer to the question ‘Can it remain like this?’ Every stationmaster
would inscribe the catechism in flowers in his garden. Justice for Hungary! But
nobody in the world took it seriously, this thirst for the lost territories.
Nobody but Hitler. Such madness—like riding a tiger. In Budapest, the government
makes friends with this man. Soon they are in the belly of the beast. It was a
mistake for which this country would suffer so terribly. But nobody suffered
more than we did.”
“And were you around when … ”
“All the houses were set on fire. The people who lived here—whose ancestors had
worked here as long as anyone could remember—rousted from their beds, their
fields, the breakfast tables. Rounded up and forced at gunpoint to walk along
the iced-over waters of the Tisza until the ice broke and they fell in. Whole
families, walking hand in hand—then, a minute later, drowning, freezing, in the
icy waters. They say you could hear the ice cracking all the way up the
vineyards. I was in the castle at the time, and it was being shelled. I thought
the walls would collapse in on us. Much of it was destroyed. But in the cellars,
we were safe. A day later, the army had moved on, and I wandered back to the
village of my birth, the only home I had ever known, and—nothing.”
Her voice faded to an inexorable whisper. “Nothing but pillage and destruction.
Charred ruins, black embers. The occasional farmhouse on the mountain had
escaped destruction. But the village of Molnar, which had survived the Romanian
pillage, the Tartars and the Turks, was no more. No more. And in the river, so
many bodies were floating, like an ice floe. And among them, naked, bloated,
bluish, were the bodies of my very own parents.” She raised a hand to her
forehead. “When you see what human beings can do to each other, it makes you …
ashamed to be alive.”
The two Americans were silent for a moment.
“How did you find yourself in the castle?” Janson asked after a while.
The old woman smiled, remembering. “Janos Ferenczi-Novak—a wonderful man, and so
was his Illana. To serve them was a privilege, I never forgot that. You see, my
parents and my grandparents and my great-grandparents worked the land. They were
peasants, but over time, the nobleman deeded them small parcels of land. They
grew potatoes, and grapes, and berries of all sorts. They had hopes for me, I
think. I was a pretty little girl. It’s true. They thought if I worked as a
servant at the castle, I would learn a thing or two. Perhaps the count would
take me with him to Budapest, where I might meet a special man. My mother
nurtured these sorts of dreams. She knew one of the women who helped run
Ferenczi-Novak’s household, and had her meet her little girl. And one thing led
to another, and I met the great man himself, Count Ferenczi-Novak, and his
beautiful blue-eyed wife, Illana. The count was spending more and more time in
Budapest, in the circles of the government of the Regent Horthy. He was close to
Miklos Kallay, who would become prime minister. I think he was some sort of high
minister in Kallay’s government. The count was an educated man. The government
needed such men as he, and he had a strong sense of public service. But even
then, he would spend several weeks at a time in his country estates, in Molnar.
A tiny village. A tavern owner. The grocer, a Jew from Hódmezövásárhely. But
mostly farmers and woodcutters. Humble folk, eking out a living along the Tisza
River. Then came the day my mother took me to the castle on the hill—the castle
we had somehow imagined, growing up, to be part of the mountain itself.”
“It must be hard to remember something that happened so long ago,” Jessie
ventured.
The old woman shook her head. “Yesterday is sunk into the mists of the past.
What happened six decades ago, I can see as if it is happening now. The long,
long path, past his stables. The stone gateposts with their worn carvings. And
then, inside—the curving staircase, the worn steps. It took my breath away.
Drunken guests, people said, would slip on those worn steps. Later, when I
joined the household staff, I would overhear Countess Illana talking about such
things—she was so funny, and so dismissive about it all. She never liked the
staghorns mounted on the walls—did any castle not have them? she protested. The
paintings, Teniers, Teniers the Younger. ‘Like every castle in Central Europe,’
I once heard the countess say to someone. The furniture, ‘Very late Franz
Josef,’ she would say. And how dark it was in the main hall. You didn’t want to
put a hole through the frescoes, you see, to put in electric lighting. So
everything
glowed with candlelight. In that hall, I remember, there was a grand piano, of
rosewood. With the most delicate lace cloth on top, and a silver candelabra that
had to be carefully polished every Saturday. And outside it was as beautiful. I
was dizzy with excitement the first time I walked through the English-style
garden in the back. There were overgrown catalpa trees, with their misshapen
limbs, littering pods everywhere, and pollarded acacias and walnut trees. The
countess was very proud of her jardin anglais. She taught us to call everything
by its proper name. In English, yes, English. Another member of her household
drilled me in this language. Illana enjoyed addressing people in English, as if
she were living in a British country house, and so we learned.” She looked oddly
serene. “That English garden. The smell of freshly mown grass, the fragrance of
roses, and hay—it was like Paradise to me. I know people say I live in the past,
but it was a past worth living in.”