A big old-fashioned travelling coach came up behind. A closed carriage with tightly shut windows making a rhythmic jingle of harness drew alongside. It was drawn by two large bay mares, so fat that they were either in foal or had been fed too much hay. On the box was an old coachman wearing a threadbare cherry-red coat — a fashion of the sixties and on his head was a round hat with an ostrich feather now no more than a tuft. He sat, crooked as a folding knife, nodding his head as if answering the horses’ silent questions. As the coach passed, Balint saw a little maid sitting on the front seat with a basket on her lap and, in the rear, propped up with cushions, a tiny shrivelled-up old lady. He recognized her at once and bowed, but the old lady never saw him. She gazed directly in front of her, squinting under knitted brows into the distance, into the nothingness over her maid’s head, her mouth puckering as if she were whistling.
It was the old Countess Sarmasaghy, in this part of the world Aunt Lizinka to almost everybody. Through her numerous brothers and sisters she really was aunt to two generations of all the families of the district, and the sight of her, silent and alone in her old-fashioned coach, reawakened in Balint the memories of his boyhood in Kolozsvar. Even now he could recall the airless room in which Aunt Lizinka sat in a wing-chair with its back to the tightly closed windows, windows that were never opened for although in perfect health the old lady dreaded catching cold. Between her and the windows were two glass screens as an added protection. She had been huddled into a confused mass of shawls, plaids and scarves, and on her head had been a little lace bonnet under which a small knitted cushion was tied to her forehead. The bonnet was fastened under her chin by a tangle of silken bows. Of her face all that could be seen were her glittering eyes, a sharp eagle-beaked nose and thin colourless lips covered in star-shaped wrinkles. He had been terrified of this shrunken witch-like figure who seemed to have no body at all but only a narrow face and beaky nose, just as he had read in the old fairy books. Balint’s mother had pushed him forward. ‘Now, Balint, kiss your aunt’s hand properly!’ and he had kissed the little shrivelled camphor-smelling claw as he was told. He had hated it, but worse was to come. The gnarled little hand had grabbed him and pulled him towards the scarves and shawls with a force that nobody would believe, and then the old lips, unexpectedly moist, had planted a wet kiss on his forehead. For some time after being released from this terrifying embrace he could feel the cold saliva drying on his head; but he had been too strictly brought up to be caught wiping it off.
As the old woman passed in her coach Balint thought that even then she had looked as old as she looked now and he remembered, too, many other things things that she had told him about herself or that he had been told about her by his grandfather, old Count Peter Abady, who was her first cousin.
He smiled to himself as he recalled one of her escapades.
In 1848, during the revolution, Countess Sarmasaghy, born Lizinka Kendy, was a young bride. Her husband Mihaly was a major in Gorgey’s army (everyone was a major then) fighting for Hungary’s independence and she was so much in love with him that, against all tradition, she followed the army everywhere in her carriage. She was at Vilagos when Gorgey surrendered and, ardent patriot that she was, she went immediately up to the Castle of Bohus, burst into the great hall where all the Hungarian and Russian officers were collected, brushed them aside until she faced General Gorgey and yelled at him in her sharp shrill voice ‘Governor! Sir, you are a traitor!’
Nothing had ever daunted her, and she was never afraid to say what she thought. She also had a cruel and merciless tongue. She had loathed Kossuth, and every time that his name was mentioned she would tell the story of him at the National Assembly in Debrecen. The Russians were approaching and no one knew what to do. According to Aunt Lizinka, Kossuth rose to speak and said, ‘There is no need to panic! Mihaly Sarmasaghy is on his way with thirty thousand soldiers!’ And great cheering broke out, even though Mihaly Sarmasaghy, accompanied only by his tiny wife, was actually sitting in the public gallery above. As Aunt Lizinka told the tale she made it seem that everyone knew that her courage alone equalled an untold number of fearless soldiery.
After the revolution, during which her husband had been imprisoned, it was she who handled the appropriations crisis which nearly bankrupted her husband’s family. She took their case to every court, she fought against the enforced leasing of their lands, mines and properties, and she got her husband released from his captivity at Kufstein. First she mastered all the legal intricacies of the new decrees, laws and amendments, the complications of Austro-Hungarian imperial patents, and the commercial methods of running the family mines; then she fought their case from Vasarhely to Vienna, and won.
All this Balint recalled as the old lady’s coach passed his, and this made him think, too, of his grandfather, her cousin, to whom she paid regular visits every year. He could see the two of them now, sitting together on the open veranda of the mansion at Denestornya where his grandfather had lived. Aunt Lizinka, almost submerged in her shawls and scarves, her knees pulled up, curled like a lapdog in a huge cushioned armchair; Grandfather Abady, facing his cousin in a high-backed chair, smoking cigars, as he did all day long, from a carved meerschaum holder. Aunt Lizinka would, as always, be recounting gossip about their friends, neighbours and cousins. All that Balint would understand, and remember, was his grandfather laughing ironically and saying, ‘Lizinka, I don’t believe all these evil stories: even half would be too much!’ And the old lady would declare: ‘It’s true. Every word is true. I know it!’ But the old count just smiled and shook his head, disbelieving, because even if the old countess said things that were mischievous and untrue at least she was funny when she did so.
At Denestornya Count Peter had not lived in the family castle, but in a large eighteenth-century mansion built by his own grandfather at a time when the two main branches of the Abady family had become separated and the family lands divided. The big castle had been inherited by Balint’s mother, together with three-quarters of the family estates, and it had therefore been a great event when she married Peter Abady’s son and thus reunited the family domains of Denestornya and the estates in the Upper Szamos mountains.
Count Peter had handed everything over to his son on his marriage. He kept only the mansion on the other side of the hill from the castle at Denestornya and, when his son Tamas died suddenly when still quite young, he insisted that his daughter-in-law kept the properties together and managed them. Though young Countess Abady wanted the old count to move back to the castle, he always refused; and in this he was wise, as Balint came to understand later, because although she seemed offended by his refusal, with her restless nature the good relations existing between the old count and his daughter-in-law would not have withstood the strain of living under the same roof. As it was, they kept up the old custom established when Tamas was still living: on Wednesdays Count Peter lunched at the castle, on Sundays Balint and his mother went to his grandfather’s house.
As the young Balint grew up, he often went to see Count Peter on other occasions as well. He would escape from his tutors, which was not difficult, and, as the castle park was separated from the mansion’s garden only by two low walls and the Protestant cemetery, he would pretend he was a Red Indian and sneak away silently like ‘Leather-Jerkin’ over the little wall, pretending it was a high and fearsome tower. When he arrived at his grandfather’s, the old man would notice his grubby and dust-covered clothes, but he would never ask him which way he had come or how he had got so dirty. Only if he had torn a hole in his jacket or trousers, and lest trouble should come of it, would he have the damage repaired and send a servant to unlock the park door when the boy went home.