Miklós Vámos - The Book of Fathers

Later, a young man and skillful, as he rode with his flintlock for the first time into the depths of the forest he had just inherited, he was equally unsure what made him announce in the middle of a clearing, with great solemnity: “In this sacred place we shall set up a manufactory for glass.” He repeated these words, changing only “this” to “that,” when he reached home.

“Why?” asked Janka.

“So that we can trade in light,” he replied, his face transfigured.

Neither his wife’s sensible arguments nor his estate manager’s facts and figures could dent his resolve, still less the fact that even tinted spectacles could not protect his weak eyes from the glassworks’ incandescent furnace. He imported two master glassmakers from Saxony and within a year the first glass panes for wooden window frames were in production. After these came glass bottles, containers for shipping wine, wine decanters, and countless other glass products. The goods sold well, orders came in from all over the country. Janka asked him a hundred times: “How on earth did you know?”

He dared not admit that his knowledge was unearthly. Now, on his deathbed, when he could no longer communicate what he could see to his wife and three sons, the flow of images unexpectedly began anew. Finally he understood what it was that, at the age of thirty, and as a successful stud-farmer, had made him build a glassworks in the middle of the forest inherited from his wife’s kinsmen. There unrolled before him in a series of drab tableaux the history of the clan of the Csillags. He could see his father, Péter Csillag, and his father’s father, Pál Csillag, who had ended up in Bavaria and made his living as a shoemaker, but had previously owned a prosperous glassworks in the Slovak Highlands destroyed by the Ottoman Turk. He saw his paternal great-grandfather János fleeing his home as a youth and then being killed in one of the Turkish campaigns of the legendary Miklós Zrínyi: a cannonball tore him apart as he was scraping the mud off his boots.

He could see himself, as a boy, clinging onto a starved dog with matted fur. Yes… then, a long time ago, there in the clearing he had had a vision, until he lost consciousness, but he had not realized that he should have preserved on paper these seemingly chaotic images. And now he saw Grandpa Czuczor, burying some kind of casket at the bottom of the garden, under the rose bushes.

“The treasure! Grandpa’s treasure! The roses…” he wanted to cry out. No words issued from his lips.

His grieving relatives heard a rattle from his throat and thought Kornél Sternovszky was no longer for this world. Someone placed a damp dressing on his brow; the cool droplets ran down his temples. Exhausted, he closed his eyes. He could hear his loved ones whispering, the swish of skirts and coats on the wooden floor; this troubled him. He thought again what a blessing it would be if they just let him alone. He saw the dog Málé, then his sole companion, dying in his arms. Perhaps Málé, too, would have preferred to take leave of the world by himself.

He had been scared to death when the sky had darkened in the middle of the day, when the sun was swallowed up by blackness. Later he was told that there had been an eclipse. His eyes never recovered from that burning; thereafter they watered frequently and were always weak.

The final tally, then: in the course of my life I received from God the wondrous gift of the Vision no fewer than three times. It is no use sorrowing that the third came so late. Boundless is His power, inscrutable are His ways. Might I hope that His kindness will extend to my children also?

He felt a leaden tiredness in his limbs. He arranged his arms across his chest as he had seen on sarcophagi. My time is done. I give myself into His hands. Fiat voluntas tua Domine.

Why did he go and throw that boiling tea in the master glassmaker’s face? And why, to cap that, did he go and draw his sword on him? After all he, Kornél Sternovszky, was hardly a distinguished swordsman, whereas the brute of a master glassmaker was said to be a veteran of a dozen duels. At the first clash of blades, the glassmaker had wrenched the weapon from his hand, with the same downward movement stabbing him deep in the chest. He could feel distinctly the foam of blood spatter across his chest.

When he was four, he had been found by good people-traveling Gypsies-with barely a sign of life in his body. As he recovered, there were days when he could only howl and scowl, and it was weeks before he was speaking again. Now, as he is laid out, he can no longer make the smallest sound. Now there comes to cover him again the odious dankness of the dark.

THE BURNING ORB OF THE SUN BLAZES A PATH ACROSS THE heavens, like some truculent sovereign sultry on high. The crops are chiffon scarves waving in the wind. The air is pale blue and restless with flurrying things: a broken twig, a fluttering feather, small scraps of cloth, grains of sand, fallen rose blossoms, as if Mother Earth sought to shake off whatever she deemed superfluous. As the air warms up, so the countryside fills with the joyous sounds of nature. From the stalls and stables sounds of braying and grunting and neighing fill the air at all hours of the day. Birds burst into song, as do the children in many a house.

That year estate manager Károly Bodó was determined that the maypole would be of quite outstanding height. He took the trouble personally to select from the thick of the forests of the estate the tallest of their magnificent maples, which took the foresters hours to fell. Four of his men had endless trouble hauling it out onto the track, where they could at last maneuver it onto a cart. For displaying the maypole, manager Bodó had picked a spot on the gentle slope in front of the tiny artificial lake in the park of Castle Forgách. There were groans aplenty from the men: there was no stonier ground in the entire estate and they would have to dig extra deep if the winds were not to bring it down on the gardener’s lodge or, on the other side, the delicate tracery of the wooden bridge’s balustrade. All in vain. Manager Bodó brooked no opposition: his word was law.

Manager Bodó knew what he was doing in insisting on this site. Planted here, the maypole could be seen with equal ease from the road, from the garden, and from the spacious first-floor terrace, the venue for most of the festivities.

The delicate curly leaves of the estate’s renowned two-hundred-year-old walnut trees had turned a deep green and, as every autumn, manager Bodó had had the crop carted down to the plain where they fetched a very acceptable price. The trees yielded walnuts the size of smallish hen’s eggs. Their shells were so thin they were almost transparent, and it was the work of a moment even for a small child to crack them open. Manager Bodó himself was particularly fond of walnuts and could hardly wait for them to ripen, sometimes having them shaken down as early as July and delightedly consuming his share of the crop dipped in honey or crumbled onto strips of pasta, or even raw, keeping a handful stuffed in his pocket. He liked to have something to chew on: pumpkin seeds, a sweetmeat of some kind, or even the stem of a pipe.

Manager Bodó had served the Count’s estates for many a year. A distant relative of the Countess’s mother, he had been taken on after her premature death, more or less out of kindness, but with his industrious nature and sharp mind for business, he had quickly proved he needed no favors. He presented just one enduring problem: he could not stand music. He had been born cloth-eared-in both ears. Count Forgách and his wife, however, could not live without the sound of music, and their many visitors and guests were entertained by concerts, amateur operas, and choral singing every weekend, especially around Whitsuntide and in the Christmas season.