Janson recalled the ruins that were visible farther up the hill: all that
remained of the vast estate were jagged remnants of walls that rose only a few
feet from the ground, barely visible through the tall grass. Eroded brick mounts
of once grand chimneys protruded through the scrub like tree stumps. A castle
that had stood proudly for centuries was reduced to rubble—not much more than a
rock garden. A lost world. The old woman had entered an enchanted garden once.
Now she lived in the shadows of its ruins.
The wood fire cracked and hissed quietly, and for a minute no one spoke.
“And what about the scampering of little feet?” Jessie asked finally.
“They had only one child. Peter. Would you like a drop more pálinka?”
“You’re real kind, ma’am,” Jessie said. “But I’m fine.”
“Peter, you said,” Janson repeated, deliberately casual. “When was he born?”
“His naming day was the first Saturday in October 1937. Such a beautiful boy. So
handsome and so clever. You could tell he was meant to be a remarkable human
being.”
“Was he, now?”
“I can picture him still, walking up and down the long mirrored hallway in his
Peter Pan collar and his little plus fours and his sailor’s cap. He loved to
watch his reflection reflected back and forth between two facing mirrors,
multiplying forever, smaller and smaller.” Her smile drew with it a trellis of
wrinkles. “And his parents were so devoted to him. You could understand that. He
was their only child. The birth was a difficult one, and it left the countess
unable to conceive.” The old woman was in another place, another world: if it
was a lost world, it was not lost to her. “One day, just after lunch, he ate
some pastries the cook had made for tea, like a naughty little boy, and the cook
berated him. Well, Countess Illana happened to overhear. Don’t you ever talk
that way to our child, she told her. And just the way she said it—little icicles
hung off her words. Bettina, she was the cook, her cheeks flamed, but she didn’t
say anything. She understood. We all did. He was … unlike other boys. But not
spoiled, you must understand. Sunny as the first of July, as we Hungarians say.
When something pleased him, he’d smile so hard you’d think his face would split.
Blessed, that child was. Magical. He could have been anything. Anything at all.”
“Peter must have been everything to them,” Jessie said.
The old woman stroked her dog’s flank again, rhythmically. “Such a perfect
little boy.” Her eyes lit up, briefly, as if she were seeing the boy in front of
her, seeing him in his knickerbockers and sailor’s cap swanning in front of the
mirrors on both sides of the hall, his reflections trailing off into an infinite
regress.
The crone’s eyelids fluttered and she closed them hard, trying to halt the
pictures in her mind. “The fevers were terrible, he was like a kettle, tossing
in bed and retching. It was a cholera epidemic, you know. So hot to the touch.
And then so cold. I was one of those who attended him on his sickbed, you see.”
She put both her hands on her dog’s face, gaining comfort from the creature’s
steadfast strength. “I can never forget that morning—finding his body, so cold,
those lips so pale, his cheeks like wax. It was heartbreaking when it happened.
He was just five years old. Could anything be sadder? Dead, before he truly had
a chance to live.”
A heaving sense of vertigo, of utter disorientation, overcame Janson. Peter
Novak had died as a child? How could that be? Was there some mistake—was this
another family the old woman was describing, another Peter?
And yet the accounts of the philanthropist’s life were all agreed: Peter Novak,
the beloved only son of Janos Ferenczi-Novak, had been born in October 1937, and
reared in the war-torn village of Molnar. That much was part of the official
record.
But as for the rest of it?
There could be no doubt that the old woman was telling the truth as she
remembered it. And yet what did it mean?
Peter Novak: the man who never was.
Amid a growing unease, possibilities fluttered through Janson’s mind, like
shuffled and reshuffled index cards.
Jessie unzipped her knapsack, took out the picture book on Peter Novak, and
opened it to a color close-up of the great man. She showed it to Gitta Bekesi.
“See this fellow? His name is Peter Novak.”
The old woman glanced at the picture and looked at Jessie, shrugging. “I do not
follow the news. I have no television, take no newspapers. Forgive me. But, yes,
I think I have heard of this man.”
“Same name as the count’s boy. Sure it couldn’t be the same person?”
“Peter, Novak—common names in our country,” she said, shrugging. “Of course this
is not Ferenczi-Novak’s son. He died in 1942. I told you.” Her eyes returned to
the photograph. “Besides, this man’s eyes are brown.” The point seemed to her
almost too obvious to belabor, but she added, “Little Peter’s were blue, like
the waters of the Balaton. Blue, like his mother’s.”
In a state of shock, the two began the long walk back to the Lancia, one mile up
the hill. As the house receded into the overgrowth, they began to talk, slowly,
tentatively, exploring the deepening mystery.
“What if there was another child?” Jessie asked. “Another kid nobody knew about,
who took on his brother’s name. A hidden twin, maybe.”
“The old woman seemed certain that he was their only one. Not an easy thing to
hide from the household staff. Of course, if Count Ferenczi-Novak was as
paranoid as his reputation had it, any number of ruses are conceivable.”
“But why? He wasn’t crazy.”
“Not crazy, but desperately fearful for his kid,” Janson said. “Hungarian
politics was in an incredibly explosive condition. Remember what you’ve read.
Béla Kun took power in March 1919, ruled for a hundred and thirty-three days. A
reign of terror. That was followed, once he’d been toppled, by an even more
horrifying massacre of the people who helped him gain power. Whole families were
slaughtered—Admiral Hor-thy’s so-called White Terror. Reprisals and
counter-reprisals were just a way of life back then. The count might have felt
that what comes around goes around. That his association with Prime Minister
Kállay could be a death sentence, not just for him but for his family.”
“He was afraid of the Communists?”
“The Fascists and the Communists both. Hundreds of thousands of people were
killed in late forty-four and early forty-five after the Arrow Cross took over.
Remember, these Arrow Cross were people who thought Horthy was too lax! True
homegrown Hungarian Nazis. When the Red Army took control of the country, you
had another round of purges. Hundreds of thousands were killed, again. Enemies
of the revolution, right? People like Ferenczi-Novak were caught in a pincer.
How many instances are there of that kind of ideological whiplash—a country
switching from far left to far right to far left again, with nothing in
between?”
“So we’re back to the old question: How do you bring a child into that world?
Maybe these guys thought they couldn’t. That any child of theirs would have to
be hidden.”
“Moses in the basket of bulrushes and pitch,” Janson mused. “But that raises a
lot more questions. Novak tells the world that these are his parents. Why?”
“Because it’s the truth?”
“Not good enough. A child like that would have been raised to be afraid of the
truth, to regard the truth as a very dangerous thing—for Christ’s sake, he might
not even know the truth. That’s the thing about a child: you can’t tell him what
he can’t deal with. In Nazi Germany, when a Jewish toddler was hidden by a
Christian family, the child wouldn’t, couldn’t, be told the truth. The risk was
too great: he might say something inappropriate to his playmates, to a teacher.
The only way to protect him from the consequences of a potentially deadly truth
was to keep him in ignorance of that truth. Only later, when the child was
grown, would he be told. Besides, if Novak’s parents were who he said they were,
this Gitta Békesi would know about it. I feel sure of it. I don’t think they had
another child. I think she told us the truth: Peter Novak, the count’s only son,
died when he was little.”
Shadows lengthened into long narrow stripes as the sun dipped behind the distant
peak. Minutes later, clearings that had been golden suddenly turned gray. On a
hillside, sunset came quickly and with little warning.
“This is getting to be a goddamn hall of mirrors, like the one Grandma Gitta
talked about. Yesterday, we were wondering whether some impostor had taken on
Peter Novak’s identity. Now it’s looking more and more like Peter Novak himself