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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Enthralling stories from the celebrated author of The Transylvanian Trilogy'A great storyteller' GuardianBack from Troy, the 'divine' Helen looks with fresh eyes at her foul-mouthed hero-husband; a girl in a mountain village seeks reassurance about her arranged marriage; a drunken mandarin invites the devil to tea; and a German princess discovers that people actually drink goat's milk. These delightful tales exhibit Bánffy's customary blend of high seriousness and subtle humour, his rich imagination and his remarkably wide-ranging sympathies.Appearing in English for the first time, in finely nuanced translations by the prize-winning Len Rix, The Enchanted Night furthers the writer's growing reputation as one of the most compelling European writers of the twentieth century.
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CONTENTS
Translator’s Introduction
As the reader will discover, Bánffy was a man of gentle sympathies and wide-ranging interests, with a deep love of his native Transylvania, the setting for several of the tales included in this volume. But this is the Transylvania of real life – albeit the Transylvania of a hundred years ago – observed at first hand by one who knew it intimately. The picture is both affectionate and unsparing. The reader will find none of the conventional horrors associated with the name, but also nothing of the picturesque idyll conjured up in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Between the Woods and the Water.
Visiting in the 1930s, Leigh Fermor found a people whose colourful costumes and way of life had changed little under the thousand years of Hungarian rule so recently ended. The near-feudal traditions, though greatly softened, were still presided over by a handful of ancient noble families, and it was into one of those that the author of these tales was born.
Meeting him at his house in Budapest, the writer Endre Illés found a soft-spoken, quietly humorous individual wandering around his large workroom. Scattered everywhere were books, manuscripts, musical scores, unfinished stage sets, paintings, paintbrushes, cartoons, caricatures and sagging armchairs, all covered in a thin layer of cigarette ash “as if blown in from a nearby volcano”. It might serve as an image of the man himself. 8
Born in 1873, he was privately educated, then sent to study law, first at the local university and then in Budapest. His whole life was to be torn between the demands of what he accepted as his public responsibilities and his personal passions and interests.
His first love was the theatre, and during his law-student years he wrote five short plays. In the same period he mastered the piano to a high level and began composing music. After his doctorate in 1897 he studied painting and drawing under Bertalan Székely, one of the leading artists of the day, and went on to become a groundbreaking stage set and costume designer. He was also a brilliant cartoonist: his collection of portraits of his fellow delegates to the 1922 Genoa conference is a collector’s item.
By then he had also published a paper championing the rights of small farmers and, after a year working as an economics correspondent in Berlin, had written a book (still in print today) on Instruments of Foreign Trade Policy. In 1922 he became an MP, very much of the liberal persuasion and with a special interest in the rights of the ethnic minorities. During the war he served as Superintendent of the State Theatres and Opera, and in 1921, at the age of forty-eight, was made Foreign Minister.
Although helpfully fluent in five languages, he faced an impossible challenge – that of trying to mitigate the consequences of Hungary’s punitive dismemberment at Trianon, which left millions of Magyars on the wrong side of international boundaries. Despite one notable success, after eight months the combined weight of foreign intransigence and internal wrangling became too much and he resigned in a state of near nervous breakdown. A career in politics had never been his aim, though he later accepted a short diplomatic posting to Paris.
In the arts world to which he more naturally belonged these achievements counted for nothing. His rank, the range of his talents and his self-deprecating charm met with resentment from 9the start, and his advocacy of modern music, especially that of Bartók (he organised the first production of Bluebeard’s Castle), brought personal attacks that pained him for the rest of his life. The easy slur of dilettantism clung to his name long after it had become obvious that he was, in the words of the poet Endre Ady, “a serious writer for serious people”.
Worse was to come. As a leading figure in the Transylvanian Hungarian community he had urged both the Romanian government and his own to distance themselves from the German side in the Second World War. In revenge, the retreating Wehrmacht plundered the family seat at Bonchida and left the building in ruins. Both countries fell under the Soviet heel and Bánffy found himself a “class alien”, an enemy of the people he had served so well. When finally allowed to join his wife in the Hungarian capital in 1949, he arrived in tattered clothes, penniless, emaciated and prematurely aged, with the manuscript of his last novel and a savagely self-mocking cartoon in his bag. He died just a year later.
Of his writings, the best known is the Transylvanian trilogy (1932–35) described by reviewers as a “masterpiece” and “Tolstoyan” in its depth and scope, and now translated into nine languages worldwide, including Chinese. As the individual titles make clear (They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting, They Were Divided: The Writing on the Wall), its purpose was to arraign his own class, the nobility, for the part their behaviour had played in the national catastrophe. The theme is echoed in the last of the tales included here, “The Enchanted Night”, while “The Stupid Li”, for all its bizarre humour, ends with the spectacle of an entire nation, its language, history and culture being swept into oblivion – a fear that has haunted Hungarians for five centuries, and not without reason.
Bánffy’s work shows more than a passing interest in the experience and inner lives of women. His early novel From Dawn till Dusk10(1927) explores the lifelong relationship between twin sisters who have to cope with personal loss and a double marital betrayal, and his last work, Milolu, written in that desperate year of 1949, is a tender love story in which the woman is a step ahead of her man in all matters personal and practical. In the present selection he follows the thoughts of a young girl awaiting an arranged marriage and describes two cases of marital abuse. Feminine responses to love and intimacy are the subject of two further tales, while “Helen in Sparta” offers a scathing critique of the chauvinistic warrior cult in Homer and the classical tradition generally. Unusual aspects of male sexuality are explored in two supernatural tales with medieval settings.
Among the more surprising is “The Contaminated Planet”. Written in 1939, it foresees the end of human life on Earth, brought about by a combination of world war, overpopulation, deforestation and climate change; it even prefigures the theory of transpermia, that bacterial life is carried across space on comets. This prophetic touch will surface again in Milolu: it opens with the theft of a major painting, in broad daylight, from the Fine Arts Museum in Budapest (where not one but two such incidents have taken place since) and hinges on the authenticity of a portrait of Christ by Leonardo da Vinci, a topic back in the news in 2019.
The initial appeal of these tales may lie in the novelty of their settings, but it is for the narrator’s easy style, his eye for telling detail and the compassionate intelligence in which the action is bathed, however grotesque or bizarre, that they will surely endure.
WOLVES
1213
It was winter. Thick snow covered the mountains and valleys of Transylvania. It had left tall round shepherd’s caps on the circular Vlach huts, turning them from black mushrooms into white. It had draped its soft white coat over the mountain slopes, sprinkled the forests with a mica-like glitter, settled thick on the mud and frozen clods and transformed the fields around the River Maros into a sea of blinding white.
Everything so white, so utterly, inexpressibly white.
Only on the Hungarian side, all the way down to the Maros, was the never-ending whiteness ripped apart. In almost every village blackened roof beams poked out through the snow. Scorched and dying poplars thrust their branches into the sky like enormous black brooms. The walls of once-grand houses and mansions, their sides besmirched by fire, criss-crossed each other at strange angles on the ruined street corners, abandoned to the empty silence. As if intent on claiming everything, the snow had poured into the gardens and roofless rooms alike, scattering its fine dust under any vaulting that had not collapsed. But despite its best efforts, on the floors of the houses and out in the gardens, mysterious dark-red stains had welled up, stains that had remained slippery underfoot. The snow had blanketed everything under its immaculate whiteness, but these dark red stains resisted every onslaught. No sooner were they covered over than they appeared again.
Among the scorched and trampled evergreens of what had once been gardens and in the stubble fields beyond, fresh burial mounds had risen. Stray dogs prowled around them, snarling and 14bickering as they scratched at the soil. Crows swirled above in a vast cloud, cawing loudly.
There was a horror in the wintry silence, a silence more profound than in any previous winter. It was as if life itself had been somehow diminished; as if there were fewer people now alive than in the past.
It was a terrifyingly silent winter, the winter that followed the Horea Peasant Uprising.
The snows had brought out the wolves. They now roamed down from the forests towards the wintry villages, ever closer to the isolated farmsteads and settlements. At first they came singly or in pairs; then, as the winter tightened and extended its grip, there were more and more of them, in ever larger packs.
They roamed in the greying light of evening and late into the night, trotting steadily around the edges of the forests, one behind the other, their heads down, in complete silence – perfectly anonymous-looking predators. At first glance you might have thought they were grey, dirty Komondors, the huge dogs used by the shepherds. They would squat at the edge of the woods, unmoving, as dogs do, and wait – wait with menacing patience for the darkness of night.
They attacked only at night. There would be scarcely a sound, but by morning half a dozen ewes would be missing, with nothing left of them but large bloodstains in the snow. The wolves plundered everywhere, always in the dark of night, stealthily, like craven thieves. Attempts to guard the farms and the flocks proved fruitless. The strong, brave Kuvasz dogs set to guard them could do nothing: they were the first to be torn to pieces, and the silence of the night remained almost unbroken.
The bailiffs put a bounty of two silver twenty-crown coins on every wolf’s head, a great sum at the time. But few were hunted, even though the proclamation was made all across the 15mountains, for the forests held another quarry that seemed more worth the trouble. On the heads of the rebel leaders an even greater price had been placed: three hundred pieces of gold for Horea himself and the same for Kloska. The two had been duly captured and taken to Gyulafehérvár, and now the hunt was on in the mountains for Horea’s deputy, Gavrila Lung. On his head, dead or alive, were a hundred pieces of gold. The wolves were left to roam in peace.
Late one afternoon a small, drab-looking group of men made its way from Toszerát in the Szamos valley up towards Mount Humpleu. They walked one behind the other, in silence. Leading the way was old Maftyé, the sawmill owner, a short, dog-faced, grey-haired man. Behind him came a tall rifleman, his superior status shown by his enormous sheepskin cap and the blue stitching on his ragged coat. He was the real leader, it was plain to see. Behind him were two men from Gyurkuca, the skinny Pántyilimon and Simion the Israelite. Last of all came the younger Maftyé, a shepherd’s boy from Meregyó, nicknamed “Rooster”.
They had come well prepared for the journey. Over their leather jackets they wore thick loden coats, all very much alike except that the tall rifleman’s was more ornate. Each had a wooden water flask and variously coloured bags and rucksacks on their backs. The tall one carried his forest ranger’s gun, the others long-handled axes.
They were making good progress towards Mount Humpleu, following a single track across the wide expanse. Their tightly laced-up boots and the lower halves of their trousers were dusted with glittering crystals. Under old Maftyé’s tread the powder creaked and groaned. Behind them they left white tracks as bright as steel in the soft clean snow.
When they reached the meadow of Pojén the old man suddenly stopped and pointed with the handle of his axe towards the edge 16of the forest on the other side. Seven wolves were trotting along, slowly and lazily, one behind the other. They were going in the same direction as the men, towards Mount Humpleu.
“There go fourteen silver twenties,” he said, with a quiet chuckle.
“A bird in the hand,” sneered Demeter Nyág the rifleman. “Keep going.”
And on they went, once again in silence, climbing steadily up the near side of Humpleu, while across the way, in the near distance, the wolves trotted steadily on, into the teeming, mysterious, snow-filled forest.
It was already dark by the time the men reached the top. Three of them hung back while the other two, the elder Maftyé and Rooster, advanced to the edge of the deep, cauldron-like hollow inside the summit. In the middle of the open space at the bottom, hidden by the surrounding rocks and in front of a makeshift hut, a large fire blazed. A young man sat next to it, staring vacantly into the flames. There was a long-barrelled gun at his side. Even before he had reached the edge of the cliff the old man called out, “It’s me, Maftyé! I’ve brought the cheese!”
He seemed to have great difficulty making his way down from the forest and through the snow. He placed his feet with elaborate care on each of the natural stone steps that led downwards, moaning and complaining all the way. Rooster followed in his footsteps. Reaching the fire, he sat down with a jolt, still grumbling and complaining, the way old men do. He offered no greeting; he simply unslung the black-striped haversack from his shoulder and threw it down as if in anger.
“There’s the cheese, Gavrila.”
“Why did you bring this boy with you?” Gavrila Lung glowered and pointed to Rooster with his chin.
But the old man went on complaining, and Gavrila had to repeat his question. 17
“All these wolves, my lad, all these wolves,” he said at last, and then suddenly found his tongue. In graphic detail, and with a great many gestures, he started to describe how the wolves had torn his finest cow to pieces the previous night – right in front of the shed, his very best cow! He hadn’t heard it squealing, and the dogs hadn’t even barked. He heaped horrific curses on wolves and dogs alike, God damn their evil throats! So many wolves, so many, many wolves. And they hadn’t left a single shred of his cow. He heard their howling only towards dawn, when he was still inside the house.
The old man seemed to have been so carried away by his story – or perhaps it was a signal? – that he followed it up with three long, drawn-out wolf howls. His companions, Demeter Nyág the forester and the two Gyurkuca men, Pántyilimon and Simion the Israelite, appeared at the rim of the crater. Gavrila reached for his gun, but Rooster was sitting on it.
“Who are these people? Maftyé! Who are they?!”
“Hunters, wolf hunters. They came with me,” he replied calmly, and spat in the fire. The flames hissed loudly.
The others approached quietly, heavy-footed, without haste. They greeted Gavrila politely (“God send him a quiet evening”), and, with much complaining and groaning, they too seated themselves round the fire, Demeter Nyág on one side of Gavrila and Rooster on the other. Next were the two men from Gyurkuca, and opposite him old Maftyé, the sawmill owner.
Gavrila and Demeter were from the same village, Felsőaranyos.
“So it’s you, Uncle Mityú?” Gavrila asked. “What brings you here?”
“Yes, it’s me. It’s better up here than down in Zlatna. Soldiers everywhere there.”
A desultory conversation ensued, with long pauses. From time to time one of the men would poke the fire or throw a large log 18on it; each time this happened a shower of sparks shot up into the smoke, borne aloft like ragged little stars.
Night fell.
Gavrila still seemed to be wary. He said very little, and his right hand was never far from his waistband, where two beautiful crested French pistols peered out. But nothing in the men’s behaviour invited suspicion. They unpacked their rucksacks; one or two took off their sheepskin boots and laid out their sodden, steaming foot-clouts to dry by the fire. They chatted good-naturedly, in the monotonous tones of the mountain people, and puffed away at their pipes. They reported that the soldiers had taken over Topánfalva and were to be seen in large numbers in Alba and Felsőaranyos. They complained bitterly about the way the troops demanded two cups of butter from every household. It was a bad time, a very bad time! The words ebbed and flowed; they munched their provisions peacefully and passed round the bottle of home-made brandy. Only the tall Demeter remained silent, occasionally putting in a word or two, but keeping his eyes on Gavrila’s waistband with the pistols in it, which Gavrila kept fingering.
Old Maftyé was putting more wood on the fire when suddenly the blaze collapsed and a burning log rolled out. It ended up at Gavrila’s feet and lay there smoking. Gavrila leant over to push it back. That was his error. He should never have leant forward like that! Nyàg and Rooster leapt on him.
In a flash the other two were on him as well. Only Maftyé remained on his feet, on the far side of the fire, blinking through the fumes to observe what would happen next; but he stayed where he was.
They seized Gavrila, relieved him of his pistols and kicked his gun to one side. Nyág took two large iron shackles from his rucksack and clamped them calmly and expertly on the man’s 19two hands and one leg. Then they let him go and took their places round the fire again, somewhat short of breath from their efforts. The captive said nothing; he just stared around wildly, breathing heavily, like a wounded animal.
Once again there was silence around the fire. It was as if nothing had happened, except that where the struggle had taken place the snow was now trampled flat. They lit their pipes again, and prodded the blaze with their calloused hands. Slowly the conversation was resumed, in fits and starts – talk about taxes, the wolves, the miseries caused by the hard winter, all with many curses and much spitting in the flames, just as before.
After a while Gavrila spoke:
“Can you bring me closer to the fire? I’m freezing.”
They obliged him. Now it was Demeter Nyág’s turn to speak. He turned to Gavrila and addressed him as if trying to amuse him. He told him that it was he too, he and six of his colleagues, who had caught Horea and Kloska on the slopes of Mount Skoraset. “We took them around the fire, the way that we caught you here in the forest this evening, Gavrila. We sat down with them, just as we did here. Exactly the same.”
Gavrila Lung listened to this with interest. He even seemed to take satisfaction in knowing that his leaders had been caught by the same ruse. He asked if Ursz Ujbár and Krisán had been among them, and what had become of the others. Who else had been captured? The rest of the party now joined in. They told him everything they knew: each of them had something to add – they seemed to be treating him as an important person, the hero of the day. And thus the conversation drifted on, at a leisurely pace, as if everyone had forgotten what had just taken place – that they had just seized this man, clapped him in irons, and were about to deliver him to the hangman. The prisoner and the executioner’s henchmen chatted away merrily. It was all rather convivial: there 20were even a few jokes, heavy peasant jokes, followed by storms of laughter. Gavrila laughed just as much as the others. The jokes, after all, were in his honour.
But as the time passed he became more subdued. A couple of the men dozed off, or sat gazing up into the dark blue night in silence. Only the fire spluttered and crackled on as before.
Suddenly a new sound mingled with its cracklings. A muted howling, from somewhere in the distance, slow and long-drawn-out. Strangely enough, it seemed to reach them not through the air but through the ground, through the snow itself. The sound came again, and then a third time: the howling of wolves.
Rooster had heard it first, and had leapt to his feet, followed by Pántyilimon and Simion. Now they were all up and listening intently. Finally old Maftyé broke the silence:
“They’re not very far away… Not far at all… Now there’s a nice few silver twenties for the taking, if my eye was still good and I had my gun with me,” he went on. He kept his eyes straight ahead, as if addressing the fire, but the remark was clearly aimed at Demeter Nyág.
“Can any of you imitate their call?” the tall forester asked.
Wolf hunting involved two people: a marksman and a caller (almost any mountain dweller could do that). The lanky Pántyilimon displayed his expertise at once. He leant down to the ground, made a funnel of his mouth with his two hands and produced a long-drawn-out howl, the veins on his scrawny neck bulging like ropes with the pressure. Demeter Nyág was impressed enough to say, “Good!” and at Maftyé’s insistence they prepared to set off at once. The marksman and Pántyilimon would lead the way. Rooster and the other man from Gyurkuca would act as beaters.
“As the oldest, I’ll stay by the fire,” the sawmill owner offered by way of encouragement. “I’ll keep an eye on it, and on Gavrila. He won’t escape.” 21
This was said regretfully, as if he were deeply upset not to be going with them.
The others set off.
Along another ridge of the mountain, one that led towards Muncselmare, seven wolves were making their way, one behind the other. The leader was exceptionally large, with a thick mane in the shape of a collar. Nose down and tail pulled in, he trotted along at a gentle pace. From time to time he would stop, and the others stopped too. He would listen, as if concentrating intently on something, then set off again. They trotted in silence, the only sound the occasional crackling of the snow under their feet. Sometimes the collared leader would pause and look around him; then on they went, at the same steady pace, ever onwards.
From somewhere on the other ridge came a faint howling: once, then a second time. The wolves came to a halt. All seemed silent… No, there it was again! The leader set off once more, with the rest following, but now more cautiously, and with longer gaps between them. The howling came again, this time closer. Something about it was not quite right. The huge wolf slowed his pace, now suspicious. Was that really the call of one of their kind?
They reached the edge of the forest. The leader stopped and peered through the tangled darkness of low-hanging pine branches into the clearing. How bright it was out there! In its virgin purity the snow lay smooth and level in the first light of dawn. No suspicious tracks marred its surface. The wolf took a few steps out into the open.
A shot rang out.
What length of time is shorter, more infinitesimally brief, than an instant? It was in that infinitesimal fraction of a second, before he even heard the shot, that the wolf noticed the hunters: too late to avoid the bullet, but enough time to turn and flee for his life – and for the other six to turn back towards the thicket and do likewise. 22
As he leapt after his companions the huge wolf kept snapping at his leg and snarling. They ran back the way they had come and vanished into the wilderness, all seven of them. Soon they were trotting on again, just as they had before, but now the last in the line, the former leader, was leaving occasional marks in the snow, tiny drops of dark red blood. But on they went, ever onwards, at the same steady pace.
Maftyé sat in silence, the soles of his shoes resting on the dying logs. Through tiny reddened eyelids he gazed blankly at the fire. He seemed completely engrossed in the dancing and fluttering of the flames, in the gold at its centre, and in the little blue flamelets that raced to the ends of logs as if hoping to escape upwards into the smoke, then sinking back into the wood. Sometimes a little blue flame would shoot out sideways from a crack in the bark, as if deliberately blown out by someone inside, shrieking as it went and ending in a loud crackling and a scattering of sparks in every direction; then the log would split open and the gap grow into a pair of smiling lips around a mouth that opened to reveal a fiery hell. Or it might be the turn of a dry sprig or a grey splinter, then a sudden burst of light would project the hard shadows of those sitting beside it into the distance.
Gavrila was no more talkative than his companion. The departure of the others and finding himself alone with the dog-faced man made the feeling of captivity weigh on him all the more heavily, and the shackles had begun to press into his flesh. Dim memories of the gallows arose in his mind, images of the gallows at Fehérvár, where they would be taking him. It seemed impossible to imagine. So he said nothing. He just whimpered softly to himself.
After a long pause Maftyé spoke.
“So you were the one who led that group at Topánfalva?”
The old man had not said when this was, but the other understood him to mean when the treasury had been raided.23
“Why do you ask?” said Gavrila.
“I was just wondering.”
“Well, yes, it was me. But why do you ask?”
“I was just wondering,” the sawmill owner repeated impassively, and spat into the flames.
Again they sat in silence, not moving. Gavrila sensed that the old man wanted to say something but did not encourage him. At last Maftyé spoke, keeping his eyes fixed on the fire.
“That must have been a good haul, then. A good haul…”
“It certainly was.”
Maftyé muttered something else, and poked the fire.
Something seemed to be troubling his mind and he blinked repeatedly. He poked the fire again, as if summoning up his courage. After another pause, during which Gavrila said nothing, he spoke again:
“What would you give me if I let you go?”
Gavrila felt a flash of hope: here was his chance of escape, his one hope of freedom! But he did not let it show. He remained every bit as guarded as the older man.
“Hmmm. I’d give you five pieces of gold,” he said, and, to emphasise his own generosity, he added: “and a suckling pig at Easter.”
The old man made no answer. He took another large block of wood and placed it on the fire, manoeuvring it carefully into the place where it would burn most efficiently, and moving his hands freely among the flames as he did. You would have thought they would have been burned, but the heat did not seem to affect him, even when he pushed the embers back in place with his bare palms. His skin seemed to be fireproof.
“I could make it a lot more than that!” said Gavrila.
The old man continued to stare into the fire, his chin jutting forward and his teeth clamped. It was the wide, thin-lipped mouth 24that gave him the dog-look and that pitiless expression. That, and the deep-set eyes.
“I could make it a great deal more, let’s say double that, ten pieces of gold!” Gavrila added. There was no further mention of the pig.
The sawmill owner made no reply.
Gavrila was now eaten alive by hope. Anticipation sat like a great lump in his throat. He was conscious that time was passing, that the others would be back very soon, and that would be the end of it.
“Speak up, Maftyé! Say something. How much do you want?”
Another shot was heard, somewhere not too far off. Gavrila became increasingly restless. He knew that the others could be expected soon.
“Come on, Maftyé! I’ll give you even more, do you hear? Say something, Maftyé! How much? What about half? Do you want half? They’ll be here any minute! Answer me! Half?”
With a look of desperate pleading, he gazed into the old man’s face, now painted red in the glow from the fire below. Finally the sawmill owner said:
“How would I know how much was half?”
“I don’t know either, but it’s a lot, a huge amount,” Gavrila insisted. “We’ll get it out together. Just set me free. We’ll dig it up together.”
“Hmmm. All right, then.”
“But you must let me go. They’ll be here at any moment. You heard those gunshots.”
But Maftyé was not to be hurried.
“Tell me where it is, Gavrila.”
“Set me free and I’ll show you.”
“I can’t do that. First you must tell me. I’m an old man, you are young; if you ran off I wouldn’t be able to catch you.” 25
Gavril was clearly tempted, but his suspicion prevailed.
“I can’t tell you first.”
“That’s fine,” the old man with the dog face replied, and he spat heartily into the fire, to show that it was all the same to him.
Again they were silent. Gavrila was listening out with every pore in his body: was that a cracking sound, out there in the forest? Was that the others arriving? He was tormented alternately by fear and by yearning. Again the image of the tall gallows loomed up before him, the four-pillared one at Gyulafehérvár he had once seen on a visit to the market. He remembered it as vividly as if it were there in front of him. Between the pillars hung some withered, shapeless objects. Children were throwing stones at them. They made a dull, empty sound, the sort you would expect from tree bark. That dull, hollow sound was truly horrifying.
Tense in every fibre of his being, he listened to hear if the others were coming. Every noise – the snapping of a branch, an especially loud hiss from the fire – convulsed him. And all the time he could see the forest growing less and less dark, as he listened for the sound of the men approaching, when it would all be over.
Finally he could stand it no longer.
“It’s next to the spring at Gruju Urszuluj, under the tall silver fir, beside a beech tree. There’s a cross cut in the root. It’s underneath that.” This was delivered at speed, in a low husky voice, almost a whisper. “Now let me go, quickly!”
The old man stood up. But he did not go over to Gavrila. He walked about twenty steps away, to a tall tree that had fallen, and hacked off first one branch, then another, and then a third. Then, very slowly, with some difficulty, possibly exaggerating the difficulties of age, he dragged them towards the fire. He took his time, breathing heavily. The branches scored deep marks in the snow behind him.26
He sat down by the blaze again and began to whittle away at the wood with his long-handled axe.
The other man was now begging him with increasing desperation: “Maftyé, Maftyé, let me go!” The old man simply ignored him. The pleadings began to alternate with confused curses, but he was no longer listening: it was if he had gone deaf. Calmly and steadily he shaved the wood, then drove the axe into a tree trunk beside him to keep it there handy for later. He added a few more logs to the fire, sat down again, and began to arrange them with his gnarled and scaly hands. He did not so much as glance towards Gavrila, sitting there writhing and squirming in his rage, begging and cursing: “You villain! You scoundrel!” His old dog face seemed to be carved out of wood. It showed no sign of a smile, no hint of gloating or ill will: it was as expressionless as ever.
Finally there came the sound of footsteps, the crunching and crackling of the snow and the sound of men talking loudly, from the direction of the forest, and Gavrila fell silent, though his chest was heaving.
The party set off down the mountain, taking the path they had climbed up earlier that evening, but this time there was a new member of the group, the shackled Gavrila. They walked just as they had before, one behind the other, without speaking, making very little noise. In their drab winter clothing, in the way they moved, in the closed, taciturn expressions on their faces, they all looked much the same. But for the handcuffs glinting on Gavrila’s wrist you would have been hard pressed to say which were the guards and which the prisoner.
When they reached the bank of the Szamos they stopped to rest. At this point, to everyone’s surprise, old Maftyé declared that he would not be escorting the prisoner on to Topánfalva: he had to get back to the mill; he didn’t want to leave it unattended for any longer, he added.27
Before they went on they discussed – in front of Gavrila himself – how much each would get from the blood money: for each man fifteen pieces of gold; an extra fifteen to Demeter Nyág, as leader of the party, and an extra ten to Maftyé, for showing them where their quarry was hiding. The decision was not reached easily, because the old man kept on arguing and demanding more, despite the fact that the matter had been agreed in principle before they had come. Gavrila listened without interest, as if his head were not the one in question.
Demeter Nyág, the woodsman, the two men from Gyurkuca, Gavrila and the young shepherd Rooster set off again. Their way would take them through Gyalu Bouluj to Alba and on to Topánfalva, to hand over the prisoner and claim the reward. Old Maftyé remained behind on the riverbank. He was waiting for the others to disappear into the forest on the far side.
He waited patiently, with his head jutting forward in concentration, as if he were trying to sniff something in the air. Twice Gavrila looked back at him, but the old man continued to sit motionless, his legs splayed out in front of him. Only when Gavrila and the others had been swallowed up by the dense forest did he set off. But not towards the mill, nor indeed to Toszerát. No. He was making for the hills. He was on his way up to Gruju Urszuluj, to the spring and the tall silver fir. He struggled awkwardly up the bald slope, making a stubborn, determined effort. Then he too vanished among the pines.
That same evening seven wolves trotted northwards, away from Mount Humpleu, about a mile and a half below the ridge. Six of them formed a regular line, one in front of the other; the seventh lagged a little way behind. With every step he left a small dark-red bloodstain in the snow, a single drop. Finally they reached the edge of the forest, with the sheepfolds down below. It was still light, so they went no further but lay down, in an almost straight line. 28Their long snouts were pushed forward to sniff the fresh evening air. They scratched themselves and searched for fleas: somewhat less-than-heroic beasts of prey.
The wounded one, the former leader with the collared mane, lay a short distance away from the others. He was panting heavily, visibly tired by the journey that had left his companions unaffected, and repeatedly licking his wound.
Suddenly one of the others stood up, went over and sniffed at him. He growled a warning, but the wolf stayed where he was, staring brazenly at the wounded leader. Two others approached, defiantly, in silence. Now there were three pairs of bright green eyes trained on him.
Slowly the darkness gathered. In the descending twilight the watching eyes grew brighter and more resolute. Now there were four, five, six pairs of them. The huge collared wolf rested his head on his two front paws, emitting low growls, each one accompanied by sudden flashes of light playing over his enormous fangs. The others did not respond. They simply stared at him, unmoving, fixing him with a bright green, hungry, piercing gaze.
And now it really was night.
Six wolves made their way down towards the homesteads, towards the flocks of sheep, one behind the other, stepping in one another’s tracks. They glided across the snow like shadowy versions of the huge Komondors. From time to time they stopped, listened, then trotted on, ever onwards.
On the slope where they had rested a large pool of blood remained in the trampled snow. Handfuls of fur lay scattered around: wolf fur. A few paces further down, dragged there by its own weight, lay the huge head. The rest of the body had been torn to pieces. The chin dug into the snow, the great mouth gaped open, as if ready to attack, and the glazed eyes stared stiff and expressionless into the moonlit night.
LITTLE BORBÁLKA AND THE TERRIFYING SAFRANICS
3031
1
Little borbálka sat in the apple tree, in her usual place, on one of its stouter branches that reached out sideways over the fence.
Her father, the village notary, had two other daughters, now grown up: two skinny, busy old maids who did all the housework while Borbálka lived like a little princess, with nothing better to do than to gaze out at the world. This she had every right to do, for two years earlier, when she was still in her early teens, she had been betrothed to the assistant schoolteacher from Dolnakeresztúr.
Of course nowhere in the world is a bride expected to work, and this little bride never did a stroke. She passed her days in a most agreeable idleness. Her betrothed called her his “mysterious Psyche”, which he considered in rather superior taste. Her older sisters called her lazy and stupid, which no one thought in any sort of taste at all.
But none of that concerns us at the moment. What is important is that Borbálka spent her days sitting in the tree and observing the world.
She had a splendid view from up there. You could see a long, long way over the typically narrow north-east Carpathian village in its setting of endless beech forests – and beyond, down the equally narrow, winding valley, where the trees pressed together ever more densely on the slopes on either side, like the painted scenery in a vast theatre. Here and there, rocky peaks rose up out of the sea of green, and in the far-distant blue-grey depths of the valley the view terminated in a lacy wreath of crags. The 32forest ranged over everything, both mountain and vale. Only the tallest peaks were bare, as if scraped clean of vegetation by the ever-flying clouds.
But it was not the splendid view that attracted Borbálka and occupied her days: it was the garden of the next-door neighbour, Safranics – a mysterious, indeed secretive, garden surrounded by a stone wall and separated from her apple tree only by a narrow footpath and by the long yellow corner house, Safranics’ house. The garden sealed off his property from the market square beyond.
There are houses that create a friendly, happy feeling in you, places in which one can imagine living in calm and contentment, and there are houses that strike you as harbouring something sinister, where cruel secrets and dark sins might lurk. That was the impression given by this one, the house of Safranics, the forester on the great estate. It was a vast, shapeless, unadorned building. It rose up from the side of the square to the height of two storeys and towered over the narrow footpath, but seemed to shrink into the ground behind it because of the sharp slope of the land. There were just a couple of windows on the facade and the side facing the street, so that everything inside was as gloomy as the empty eye socket of a skull. It was very old. In the wide, empty expanse between the windows large patches of damp had eaten into the whitewash, leaving ugly green stains like leprosy. There were no eaves, no ledges under the windows or above them, and the door, the eternally closed, moss-covered front door, was as stern and hostile as a closed lipless mouth. A fortress, a bleak, grim fortress, was the house of Safranics.
No one ever went in there. The owner did everything for himself. He kept no servants, neither man nor woman, and received no relatives. If possible, he was even more closed-up than the house itself. He never went to church; he never called on the priest. He had no contact with anyone. Much of the time he would be seen 33
