Miklós Bánffy - They Were Counted

Other guests would also come to pay their respects: young men to get an introduction or to ask for help in the great world; for though Count Peter seldom moved from home, his influence was known to remain strong and widespread, not only because he was the Protestant church’s chief warden and a member of the House of Lords and Royal Standard Bearer for more than fifty years, but above all, because he was known never to support an unworthy cause. It was also believed that he had the ear of the emperor and that Franz-Josef always listened to what Count Abady had to say.

Older visitors would come for friendship’s sake — former provincial administrators from the years before the upheavals of 1848, when Count Peter had been the Prefect of Also-Feher, and ex-army officers whom he had protected and saved from imprisonment during the repressive regime of Count von Bach, the Austrian imperial minister imposed on Hungary after the 1848 rebellion.

There were two other regular visitors: Aunt Lizinka, who came for two weeks every year; and Mihaly Gal, always called ‘Minya’, a great actor of former days, who would come for three days, no more, no less. The young Balint loved Minya Gal, and when he was there he would climb the park walls several times a day just to sit listening to the conversation of the two old friends, to their jokes and reminiscences, to Gal’s tales of the theatre and his memories of his old mistress, the once famous actress Celestine Déry, and to stories about many other people whose names meant nothing to the listening boy.

The old actor came on foot and left on foot. He would never accept the offer of a carriage, though it was always made. All Balint knew was that he had kept this habit since his early days as an itinerant actor. Perhaps there was also something of a stubborn puritan pride and perhaps, walking the highways, he fancied he was young again. Minya Gal had been at school with Peter Abady in the 1820s and there, at Vasarhely, they had formed a friendship that had lasted over seventy years.

Although it was twelve years since Balint had last seen Minya Gal — at his grandfather’s funeral in 1892 — he recalled that he had come from this region and had told him he still had a small house at Vasarhely. Balint wondered if he was still alive and reflected that if he were he could not be more than five or six years short of a hundred. Balint decided that when he returned from Siklod, he would try to find out what had happened to the old actor, who had such a large part in his most treasured memories of childhood.

The sharp drumming of hoofbeats interrupted young Balint Abady’s dreams of the past and brought him back to the present. Two open carriages hurried past in quick succession. The first was driven by Count Istvan Kendy, whom everyone called Pityu; in the carriage Balint recognized one of the younger Alvinczys, who had two young women with him. It was only when they had gone ahead that Balint realized that they were the daughters of Count Laczok, Anna and Ida. When he had last seen them they had still been in the schoolroom wearing pigtails. Now they must be grown up and hurrying home from the races for, as daughters of the family, they would have to be ready to greet their guests when they arrived. They had not even glanced in his direction, but then perhaps it had not occurred to them that they would know anyone in a hired cab.

The second chaise was driven by Farkas, the eldest Alvinczy with, beside him, the third Laczok girl, Liszka. As they sped past, Balint saw that the man behind, sitting with the uniformed coachman, was his cousin Laszlo Gyeroffy. He called out and Laszlo waved and called back, but the chaise kept up its headlong pace. Obviously they were racing each other — all the more wildly as there were girls present — both the young men eager to outdo the other, to stay in front and show who was best. They were so engrossed that the race might have been a matter of life or death.

Balint was pleased and surprised to discover that Laszlo would be at Siklod. It would be good to see again his only real friend from childhood, from their days together at school and afterwards, before Laszlo had moved to Budapest for his two years at the university. From that time they had not seen each other often. A few times they had been invited at the same time by Laszlo’s aunts for partridge or pheasant shoots in Hungary and, sometimes, by chance, they had seen each other in Transylvania. But their bonds of friendship, the stronger for reaching back to their adolescence, had never weakened. It was these, rather than their blood relationship, that were close, since Laszlo’s grandmother had been old Peter Abady’s sister, which bound them together. There were other ties too, deep and unconscious, similar traits of character and the fact that they were both orphans; for though Balint still had a mother and a home to return to in the summer holidays, Laszlo had lost both his parents when he was only three. His mother, beautiful and talented, a painter and sculptress, bolted with another man, and shortly afterwards Count Gyeroffy was found dead in his woods, shot by his own gun. It was put out that there had been an accident. The family would accept no other explanation, but this vague and uncertain story had cast a dark cloud over young Laszlo’s childhood. As he no longer had a home he had been taken by his grandmother, but she in turn died after only a few years and, since then, his school holidays would be spent with his aunts. Until he came of age he would have no home of his own and so he was always a guest, sometimes with cousins in Transylvania, but more often in west Hungary, in Budapest, where his older aunt was married to Prince Kollonich and the younger to Count Antal Szent-Gyorgyi.

Balint leant out of the fiacre to look at the rapidly disappearing chaise. Through the billowing clouds of dust he could just make out the figure of Laszlo waving to him. He waved back, but dust from another passing car soon removed him from sight.

Two men sat in a half-covered victoria. On the right was old Sandor Kendy, who had two nicknames in Transylvania. To his face they called him ‘Vajda’, after his notorious ancestor, a wilful and violent-tempered nobleman whose misdeeds and arrogance had finally brought him to the scaffold. Behind his back they called him ‘Crookface’, not out of malice but because whenever he spoke or smiled — which happened seldom — his mouth pulled to one side. An old sabre scar, by no means concealed by a luxuriant moustache, made his expression seem even more ferocious.

Nearly all the Kendys had nicknames, which were needed to distinguish those with the same first name. Apart from Crookface there were two other Sandors: ‘Frantic’, so-named for his restless, changeable character; and ‘Zindi’, called after a now-forgotten bandit whom he was thought to resemble.

Next to Crookface in the open two-wheeler sat Ambrus Kendy, ten years younger who, though only a distant cousin, had a marked resemblance to the older man. So it was with all the Kendys. Prolific as the family was, they could be instantly recognized for the family looks, even in the most distant of cousins, had survived generations of separation from the main branch of the family. They were dark, with light eyes and thick bushy eyebrows. All had aggressive belligerent noses, noses like sharp beaks; eagle beaks like Crookface, falcon beaks like Ambrus; all the birds of prey were represented, from buzzards and peregrines down to shrikes. The proof of the enduring hereditary force was this; the family being so numerous, their estates had become smaller and smaller through division between so many heirs; good marriages had to be made, marriages where the dowry was more important than the bride; but no matter what ugly or feeble women they wed — crooked, lame, fat, thin, bulbous or pug-nosed — the Kendy looks endured and they bred handsome boys and pretty girls all with the same aquiline noses, dark hair and light eyes. People said this strength stemmed from heavy pruning. Through the centuries so many wayward Kendys had perished on the battlefield or the scaffold that those who were left sprouted so much the stronger.