Miklós Bánffy - They Were Counted

She thought of Judith immediately and ran towards the crowd, pushing people aside in urgent haste.

There, on the golden sand, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers eager to gaze at the detail of disaster, lay Judith, quite naked, for her swimming costume had been ripped off her, her little girlish breasts bare to the sky, her ribs and pelvis bones pathetically outlined through the naked flesh of her young body. Three burly life-guards were still desperately trying to bring her back to life.

Just as Adrienne got near, Judith opened her eyes; but in them there was no expression, no sign that she knew where she was or what had happened to her. Then she closed them again, but already her breathing was regular and so the guards flung a wrap over her, put her on a stretcher and carried her to the hotel. There Judith fell into a deep sleep.

Young Margit too was still a little confused and had to be helped to her room. Though she protested vigorously, her legs would not carry her and she had unwillingly to agree. Mlle Morin, who, at the sight of Judith’s unconscious form, had cried: ‘ Oh, mon dieu! Oh, cette pauvre enfant! ’ and collapsed in a faint to the ground, was picked up by the largest of the beach guards, thrown across his hefty shoulders like some broken old doll, and carried upstairs.

Margit was soon herself again. After lunch she started to search among Judith’s things and found hidden in her underclothes a bulky envelope which, she could tell from the postmark, had been forwarded from Mezo-Varjas and must have arrived the previous day. In the envelope was a bundle of letters tied with a ribbon and with it a letter in an unknown hand which read:

Dear Countess Judith,

I have learned that a certain Baron W. has left the country suddenly as a result of some unpleasant scandal. This person at one time used to stay in my house. Once, though whether it was to gain my confidence or out of sheer bravado, he showed me the enclosed letters. Thinking that if he showed them to me he was quite capable of showing them to other people too, I took them from him and kept them in a safe place. When the scandal broke I wondered for a long time what I should do with them. First I thought they should be burnt, but then I thought you might be worried thinking they were still in Baron W.’shands and that he might — forhe would be quite capable of such a thing — use them to blackmail either you or your family. So finally I thought it best to send them back to you so that you would know that there was nosuch danger. Please believe me when I tell youthat noone else knows of their existence and noone, apart from myself,eversawthem while they were in my house.

Sara Bogdan

Margit and Adrienne read this together. So this was the explanation! Poor Judith. What had happened that morning was obviously no accident, no unlucky accident due to recklessness.

Judith had wanted to die, and this well-meaning letter was the last death-thrust to her already wounded and grieving heart. Before she had learned what had happened to her letters she had believed firmly that everything that had taken place was the result of bad luck and the malice of other people. In her eyes her lover, that handsome young officer, had committed only one fault, and that was that he had not told her about his need to run away and that he had left her alone in Kolozsvar instead of taking her with him.

All had been a terrible shock and it had been enough to kill her confidence in the man and his declarations of love for her. But now this, this was sheer ignominy — and the knowledge that he had actually shown those letters, in which she had bared her heart, to another woman and had allowed that other woman to keep them, that was enough, her sisters realized at once, to make her try to kill herself that morning …

Later in the afternoon, when Judith woke up, they saw that she was not quite normal, that her manner was strange, disconnected, uninterested. Dutifully she drank the beef broth they gave her to drink. She even sipped a little brandy, but when the doctor came to examine her, she merely mouthed an odd sort of dumb laughter, as if she did not know where she was nor what was required of her.

Adrienne started to tell all this to Balint when, a little later, they met at the foot of the bridge where Lobetti always brought their gondola. As they floated away from their trysting place she told him every detail and, when she had come to the end of her tale, she slid down into his arms, seeking consolation and forgetfulness.

In the days that followed Judith recovered physically. Already on the morning after the ‘accident’ she was up and about in their suite, eating her food with appetite, but there was no improvement mentally. She had lost that hard, determined reserve that had been so marked in Transylvania and in the first weeks in Venice. Then, though somewhat stiff with the others and always distrustful of Adrienne, she had been full of strength, will-power and resolution. Now she was like a sick child, weak and needing constant guidance. She laughed without reason, and when she spoke there was something peculiar about her speech, for her words came out unnaturally slowly and she talked in a slovenly and drooling manner, little drops of saliva falling from the corners of her mouth.

The day of the accident Adrienne wrote to her father to tell him what had occurred, describing everything as if it really had all just been an unfortunate accident which had ended well. However, a few days later she found herself obliged to write again, admitting that Judith’s state was giving them cause for alarm, and that the mental specialist they had consulted had ordered them to take her somewhere quiet, either to the country or to a sanatorium. Something had to be done at once, and so Adrienne wrote to ask what she should do.

As she wrote this second letter to her father Adrienne knew that this meant the end of her stay, the end of those enchanted weeks of unexpected bliss and happiness, the end of everything …

After a few days a letter came from her mother, but it contained nothing but complaints. Then old Rattle wrote to say that he was too busy to come himself and so had asked his son-in-law, Pali Uzdy, to send out the old butler, Maier, who used to be a male nurse and who could speak German. No doubt if Uzdy could spare him, his presence would be a great help to Adrienne.

One evening while they were waiting for an answer from home, Riccardo rowed Balint and Adrienne farther than they had ever been before, southwards towards the salt-swept fishing town of Chioggia. It was already dusk when they started, for Adrienne now felt she had to stay on much later at the Lido.

In silence they floated over the calm waters, leaning closely against each other and holding each other tight, both too overwhelmed by their approaching separation to speak.

For once the weather was cloudy, and when they went far out, so far out that they could hardly see any sign of the shore they told Riccardo to stop rowing and just let them glide as the current took them. They stayed like this for a long time. Here the lagoon was at its widest and loneliest. There were no other boats to be seen and, as dusk slowly fell, the faint lines of the distant shores disappeared until they could no longer distinguish the horizon from the darkening sky above. Now all was a uniform greyness, empty, cold and lifeless.