Miklos Banffy - They Were Divided

As it happened Laszlo never even asked. Sometimes he would get angry with Bischitz if he wanted better or more brandy, for only this seemed to hold any interest for him. He never complained about the food — and anyhow never seemed to want very much. Old Balogh dug the garden behind the house and grew what potatoes and other vegetables they needed and, as he and Laszlo ate very little else, most of the allowance was spent on drink. The accounts were sent, by order, not to Laszlo but to the old lawyer, Dr Simay.

In this way a year had passed, during which Laszlo had really been too weak to go further than the chair outside the front door. Sometimes he did not get as far even as that but sat indoors doing nothing. Occasionally he would get hold of a newspaper — always several days old — and then he would glance over it without much interest. He never read anything else. Every now and again he would find his way into the store and exchange a few words with whoever came in. Usually, however, he talked only to Bischitz and his wife or, if they were busy elsewhere, to young Regina, for even though the child was still not quite thirteen, she was intelligent, knew where everything was kept and what its price was, and so was often entrusted with keeping the shop.

A strange relationship started to grow between the sick man and the child. It had always been one of Laszlo’s oddest characteristics that as soon as he had a certain amount of drink under his belt he shed his usual silent and morose air and became instead talkative and boastful. When this happened he would suddenly show himself immensely proud of his once grand position in Budapest society, when as elotancos — the official organizer of all the great balls and social occasions — he had been one of the most popular young men in the capital. Later, when he had come back to Transylvania disgraced and ruined because of his inability to pay his gambling debts, his old friends would tease him relentlessly whenever he began to talk about his grand past. Now, though he only had little Regina to listen to him, the same thing would happen whenever he was full of brandy, of which he now needed far less than before to make him drunk and loquacious. After only a tot or two he would begin to tell the girl all about the luxuries and grandeurs he had once known. He only had to get started and words poured from him, tales about the reception for the King of Spain and grand balls at the Palace or other great houses, banquets and dinners and dances and scintillating evening soirées. Bischitz and his wife were no good as an audience for Laszlo since they believed it was all untrue and it bored them.

But not little Regina.

She never gave a thought as to whether it was true or not. She did not care. For her it was all as magical and as real as fairyland: the great golden rooms, the velvet-covered furniture, the mountains of flowers, the lovely elegant women in silk and satin who floated in the arms of slim-waisted men in traditional Hungarian costume or officers in full-dress uniform, kings, queens, princesses and princes. It was all far more beautiful than any other tales she had read or been told. And for her, Laszlo, sitting before her, thin and wan, often unshaved and unkempt, his once elegant clothes and expensive shoes now worn and mended, was a prince of legend, doomed by some horrid spell to a life of squalor and misery, but nevertheless still the true ruler of all that splendour of which he had formerly been the central figure.

Whenever he came into the store she would lean on the counter drinking in every word he uttered. Her Titian-red hair surrounded her beautiful but still girlish face like an aureole of flame. Her doe-like brown eyes, fringed by long curving lashes, opened ever more widely as she listened and her mouth, with lips startlingly red against her pale skin, was slightly open as she feasted on all he had to tell. For Regina it all had the effect of some wondrous magic potion, and when Laszlo stopped, as he occasionally did, she would at once refill his glass with brandy and push it towards him, for she knew that he could only go on as long as he was properly supplied with his own brand of magic potion.

From time to time she would ask him some question, as if she hadn’t understood something he had said; and then he would tell her even more fabulous details of footmen in gold-braided liveries, carriages lined with silk, tables covered in gleaming plate and porcelain all laden with extraordinary food, and finally of the jewels, giant pearls and rubies, diadems and tiaras sparkling with diamonds of the finest water.

She never wanted to hear tell of anything else and, as Gyeroffy never wanted to talk of anything else, for Regina the great world consisted only of this fabulous luxury and pomp.

Several years before, when she had still been quite a small child, some inborn curiosity had drawn her to ‘The Count’, as he was called by everyone in the village. It had been enough simply to catch a glimpse of him from where she stood half-hidden inside the shop doorway, or from across the street or over the fence of the manor-house demesne. More recently it had been a great joy for her to be able to help nurse him when he was sick, but none of this had counted for anything compared with the ecstasy of being alone in the shop, with The Count sitting before her and telling his tales only to her. This was a joy so magical and so mysteriously exciting that her young spirit was completely conquered. All the grandeur and glitter of which he spoke was to her little more than the natural background to the fairy prince who sat there with her. For her the only reality was the young man himself, and everything that she heard from him was like some metaphysical halo with which he was crowned but of whose existence only she, Regina, was privileged to know, and which only she could see. It seemed to her, too, that this dream prince sought her out, waiting to come to the shop when he would be sure of finding her alone. He would keep watch until her father left the shop on some lengthy errand such as going in to Szamos-Ujvar or visiting his little parcel of thirty acres of land which was farmed for him by some luckless debtor, and then in no time at all he would come in. It only happened occasionally, perhaps once every two or three weeks; but when it did it was certain that Laszlo would appear, and because the shopkeeper’s wife also had several smaller children to mind and the household chores to attend to, it was equally certain that the young man and the girl would be left alone together.

Regina believed that he came only to see her and whenever she thought of this her heart seemed to throb high in her throat.

And, of course, in one sense she was right: Laszlo did look for the moments when he would be sure of finding her alone, but it was not her young beauty that drew him to seek her out, indeed he had never even noticed it. He had not even seen that the child was swiftly turning into a desirable young woman. For Laszlo there were two reasons why he chose those moments to go into the shop, and these two reasons were quite enough for him. The first was simply that Regina, unlike her father, poured generous measures of brandy and often of the best without Laszlo having to ask for it; and the second, which for the young man was probably the most important, was that it meant he could talk about himself and about that magical past when he had had the world at his feet and which had been so cruelly snatched from him. He could talk about the Casino Club, and the Park Club, about dinners and dances in great private houses where he, as elotancos, would lead the dance. He could talk about the perfections of Countess Beredy and of her exquisite little palace overlooking the ramparts of old Buda, and of the great white country castle of the Szent-Gyorgyis. He could describe the grandeurs of princely parties at the Kollonich palace near Lake Balaton, recounting over and over again how the state-rooms were decorated and how they all led out of one another, how the sunlight gleamed on the myriad gilt bindings of the books in the library, how the park was laid out like an English garden and how the shooting parties were organized with precision and stately attention to precedence. Above all he could talk to his heart’s content about everything that related to his love for Klara. He could describe her little room where once, and only once, they had kissed; he could tell of the dresses she wore and of those little bouquets of saffron-yellow carnations that she always carried as a symbol of their love. He could tell Regina everything, even if that everything was now long lost to him, and through no one’s fault but his own. In fact he did not tell everything to Regina. He never told her Klara’s name or anything about her except those things by which she was surrounded, her dresses, scents, flowers, the rooms through which she moved and the little capes she would put round her shoulders when going out of doors. Her name and her person were too sacred to be mentioned or described, in much the same way as certain primitive peoples hold it taboo to say the name of their god. For Laszlo the brandy washed away any hint of self-recrimination and left him only with the euphoria evoked by his memories of gaiety and beauty and grandeur.