The Book of Fathers (8 page)

His two younger brothers shrugged helplessly: they had no say in the running of the glassworks.

When the debts were such that they made the production and sale of the glass products no longer viable, Bálint Sternovszky received with equanimity the news that the glassworks would soon come under the hammer. “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away,” he said quietly.

Borbála was pregnant with their third son (whom the Lord would later be pleased to call to Him while he was
still at the breast) and held her swollen stomach before him: “Do you not see that we shall be thrown out of our own house? Where will I go with my two infants? Where will I give birth to this third one? Have you not thought of this?”

“I have. Be of good cheer. I have done everything that I could.”

More than this he was not prepared to say. Only when they had loaded what remained of their belongings onto the oxcarts and everyone had clambered up on top of them, was he willing to vouchsafe the following: “Take the road in the direction of Kos.”

“Kos? Where on earth is Kos?”

“Westwards. Keep going west until I say the word.”

The caravan set off. For several months Bálint Sternovszky and his family had fallen off the edge of the world as far as his relatives, friends, and creditors were concerned.

He was born so small that the midwife did not think he would live to see the dawn of day.

Bálint Sternovszky came into the world at about nine of the clock in the evening. He did not cry, only after hot and cold baths did he give a little squeal. His head had turned blue from the strain of the birth but it was already covered in unusually thick coils of hair. By the next evening his skin color had become more normal and his face had assumed the dreamy look that it was to bear all his life.

From a very early age his talent for music amazed his parents and teachers. He had only to hear a tune once—just once—and he was able to repeat it, immediately, note for note, even weeks later. Whenever his father sat him on his knee, he hummed Kurucz songs in his ear, despite his wife’s oft-repeated warning: “You’ll get us into trouble one of these days!”

“Janka, don’t go on! Surely one is allowed to sing!”

Allowed and aloud: certainly, Bálint did not stop all day. When he was not singing he would be humming a tune, and when he wasn’t humming a tune he would be whistling like a blackbird.

One day when he was eight he woke up hardly able to breathe. The little air that was getting through his throat was producing a dreadful, harsh wheeze. The doctor in Felvincz diagnosed diphtheria and with a resigned shake of the head by the skinny little lad’s bed said: “There is nothing more that I can do.”

Mrs. Sternovszky sobbed and howled, begging the Lord to have mercy on her son and imagining what curses she would heap on him if, God forbid … For days Bálint produced no sign of life other than a barely perceptible heartbeat. While he was unconscious he made great journeys, in regions unknown to him. When he recovered he was able to recall exactly what he had seen and heard, though for a long time he ascribed little significance to what he had come to know as he lay on the border between life and death.

Years passed, and years. When he reached sixteen he was chasing butterflies one afternoon with his brothers by the side of the brook. His younger brothers Zoltán and Kálmán were often left in his care by his mother and he always looked after them conscientiously. Since both of them seemed much shorter and more fragile than he, and than they should have been, he would not allow them to sit on grass that was wet with dew, say, or to play too close to the water.

Across the brook grazed the family’s sheep. Despite the summer sun, the shepherd did not take off his thick sheepskin coat, and his thick-coated puli dog kept yelping at the brothers, who noisily barked back. Farther up, where the stream curled away to the right, ancient willows
swept the water, the branches lightly slapping its surface again and again. The boys had tired themselves out and lay down in the shade to eat the luncheon in their saddlebags. The monotonous little noises soon made them nod off.

Bálint stirred and turned to see suddenly beauty that made his eyes ache. A girl was bathing on the far bank, almost stark naked. Her faultless skin was as white as swan’s down. Her luxuriant hair, wound around her head, was the color of blackest coal. She was splashing in the water with the abandon of a puppy. At first he thought he must be dreaming and that the slightest movement on his part would make the image dissolve.

In the evening he found out that he had seen Kata, the only daughter of the new glassmaster, Imre Farkas II. His excitement knew no bounds. He could not sleep a wink all night; he kept seeing the girl again and again, her slightest movement came to life, every curve and crevice of her body was deeply etched in his brain. The following day he spent in a moonstruck daze: he would neither eat nor drink; in his usual summer pastimes, whether hunting or ninepins, he took no pleasure at all. He was pining, pining for the bank of the stream where he might again glimpse the figure of Kata.

His mother drew him aside: “What has got into you, my son?”

In his excitement Bálint could barely blurt the words out: “Morr dear! Morr dear! My heart’s afire! I lover! I wanter! I’ll avveraswife!”

“Who?”

“Kata Farkas! I want Kata Farkas, Morr dear!”

“Who is Kata Farkas?”

The master glassmaker’s daughter had arrived only a week earlier from Vásárhely, where she lived with her mother. She was to spend a month in Felvincz. Mrs. Sternovszky had not yet seen her. She lost no time in finding
Imre Farkas, but he knew nothing of the matter. Farkas summoned his daughter.

She shrugged her shoulders. “I have never set eyes on the young sir. I wouldn’t even know if he was blond or dark or pug!”

“Pug?” Mrs. Sternovszky did not understand.

“That’s what we call a bald man back home.”

“But my son Bálint has a wonderful head of dark hair!”

“That’s as may be, but as I said, I don’t know him.” The master glassmaker gave a nod. “Right. You may go for now.” Turning to Mrs. Sternovszky, he said: “As you see, my good lady, no need to pay heed. This love affair is your son’s invention. But then he is of an age when these things happen. And besides, Kata is only rising thirteen, too soon to think of church and children.”

And that was how they left the matter. A great weight had fallen off Mrs. Sternovszky’s shoulders. Though her husband was of humble origin she, Janka Windisch, came from a line of Austrian nobles. True, her branch of the family had fallen on hard times and had only narrowly escaped ruin, but why should we rake up the past? Suffice it to say that thanks to the stables and the glassworks, they had made enough to be comfortable. Why should they allow their firstborn to marry a peasant girl? And so she told him, as soon as she caught up with him. Bálint said nothing, but in his heart he had decided otherwise. He did everything he could to catch another sight of the girl, but as she was determined not to be seen, for two days he found no trace of her. For Bálint these two days seemed like two long years. At times he felt that heavy, glittering flakes of snow were falling on his head. He was lost in a forest of dreams, desires, and images in his mind.

He made far-reaching plans. From his father’s gun room he appropriated the field glasses Kornél Sternovszky used at the horse races, and spied from every conceivable angle
on the house of the master of the glassworks. No trace of Kata. He wrote her a letter in which he lavished extravagant praise on the amazing beauty of every part of her body, from the hair on her head to the tips of her toes. He begged for an opportunity to present himself formally. He folded the letter into a triangle and sealed it with his father’s ruby-colored sealing wax. On the outside he drew a heart pierced by an arrow, but he was so unhappy with the shape of the design that he was tempted to tear the whole thing up. In the end he did not, and concentrated on how he might get the letter to Kata. He guessed that she would be at Sunday morning service at the Great Church in Felvincz: that would be an opportunity. But he did not see her there—the reason being that Imre Farkas II suspected the worst and after the departure of his wife would not let their daughter leave the house. He did not bother to explain his decision and Kata received her father’s command without emotion. She would work at her embroidery, read, help out in the kitchen, and sing and hum the bittersweet songs of her native Transylvania.

At dawn on Sunday the rain began to fall. The wind tore into the thatch on the roofs, the sky thundered darkly, the lightning creating broad daylight for a moment as it flashed. Kata was petrified. She kept wondering whether to flee the room they had made for her in the loft down to her father, but she did not want him to mock her. Trembling, she buried her face deep under the pillows, praying at the top of her voice. She begged Jesus not to be angry with her for obeying her father’s command not to go to church. She was sure that devilish creatures were abroad and in her room, and she rattled off her prayers at ever-increasing speed.

Suddenly she felt a cold hand on her arm and was about to shriek had its fingers not been clamped at once over her mouth. She heard some rustling that the next roll of thunder drowned and at the next lightning flash she had a glimpse of
the creature of the devil. It was certainly human in shape. Oh no, it’s the master’s son … And now there were words, too:

“I pray you, please, don’t scream, not a finger will I lay on you, all I beg of you is that you hear me out!”

She sat up in the bed. Her eyes gradually adjusted to the gloom. The little window was wide open and rain was falling on the parapet. He came up a ladder, she thought. Bálint stood by the side of the bed, soaked to the skin, trembling much more violently than was she. Kata took pity on him: “Hurry up and say your piece, then out, before they catch you here!”

Bálint fell on his knees but no words would come. He gripped her arm, as if that were his greatest joy on this earth. And it was then, in that extraordinary state, that the cavalcade of images began, images familiar from the past, those he had already experienced a long time ago, when he was ill, yet their meaning then had been obscure.

A half-naked man is painted green by a painter or artist in some bathhouse; the man is quite unable to wash or scrub off the paint. The painter must be one of the ancestors, he thought, that his father had told of before.

A red-bearded old man in foreign parts, packhorses and carts piled high. A large house Bálint had never known, where he could clearly see the furniture, the mysterious drawers and tools, out in the yard. The patriarchal figure must be Great-Grandpa Czuczor, who had been done to death by either the Kurucz or the Labancz. Bálint’s father had never mentioned his first name but always called him “Grandpa Czuczor.” He could even make out the inscription on the cover of the great folio book lying on the worktop:
Bálint Czuczor his notes, made by his own hand
. Now he knew he had been named for his great-grandfather.

He knew, too, that Great-Grandpa Czuczor had had to flee from Bavaria to Kos with his daughter and grandson, so
it followed that this was how their house had looked. He feasted his eyes on the scenes as the lid lifted on the past.

He saw his great-grandfather busy at the bottom of the garden, behind the rose bushes, assisted by a lad no bigger than he was now, though with hair of a startling color, as yellow as the yolk of an egg. They dug long and hard and eventually lowered into the hole a black iron casket, which they then proceeded to cover up carefully.

“
Wilhelm, du darfst das nie erzählen, verstehst du mich?
” he warned, shaking his spade at the lad.

“
Jawohl!
”

The sad end of his grandfather, too, came to life before him, a story he knew well from his father. His broad-chested dapple-gray throws Péter Csillag while he is out hunting, and as he falls he smashes his head into a tree trunk, never to recover consciousness.

“Are you unwell? Speak to me!” Kata was kneeling on the bed, the blanket drawn about her like a shawl.

Bálint gave a heavy sigh and was about to launch into his carefully prepared speech, a paean of praise for the girl’s beauty that would have culminated in a formal request for her hand. But before he could say a word fists battered on the door.

“Kata, open up! Open up at once, I say!” boomed the voice of Imre Farkas II.

“If you hold your life dear, run for it!” shouted the girl, jumping out of bed and half-pushing, half-tugging the lad in the direction of the window. He seemed not unwilling to comply, but could not bear to take his eyes off Kata’s face and the snow-white skin of her arms and legs left uncovered by her night dress. This was no time to worry about modesty, it crossed Kata’s mind. “Coming, father dear!”

By the time Bálint reached the ladder outside the window, the door had yielded to the shoulders of Imre Farkas, who was holding a three-pronged candlestick in one
hand and a drawn sword in the other. He took everything in at once. He leapt to the window and in the light of the candles saw Bálint Sternovszky scuttling down the ladder. “Stop!” he cried, and when there was no response, he flung the heavy candlestick after him. As they fell the candles flew in three different directions and went out. Down below a shadow flew by, then came the sound of footfalls dying away.

Imre Farkas wasted no time in questioning his daughter, but to little avail: whatever Kata said he would not believe. He even slapped her across the face, just to be on the safe side. “You will get a hundred times that if I ever see him hanging around you again!”

Imre Farkas stormed round to his master’s first thing and demanded to be seen. Secretary Haller did not let him in. “Later, master glassmaker, he is just breaking his fast.”

“So what?” said Imre Farkas, pushing the wizened old man aside and bursting in.

Kornél Sternovszky was just stirring his tea, which he had reinforced with a tot of rum. “What is your business here?”

Haller was hovering in the background: “I did say to him, master …”