They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [12]
‘It is nice of you to come to me so early,’ said Balint’s aunt, who had been born a Gyeroffy in far-off Transylvania, and she looked closely up at him with her large brown eyes. ‘I love to talk to you. When you’re here I don’t feel quite so far from home!’
She had smiled and put her hand on Balint’s arm. He lifted it at once and put it to his lips. For a few moments neither had spoken and then Elise Szent-Gyorgyi had started enquiring after all her old friends and relations, starting with Balint’s mother. She asked after people she had not seen for more than twenty years and told her nephew little anecdotes about them, things that had happened during her girlhood, tales of country balls and May Day festivals and picnic outings to the forests of Radna. She asked after the father of the four Alvinczy boys because he had once been her favourite dancing partner – very handsome he had been, she said, and admitted having something of a crush on him while she was still in the schoolroom; and also after old Uncle Daniel Kendy, even then too fond of the brandy, who had been so much admired by all the young girls because he had been so good-looking and elegant and they had heard that he had cut a dash at the court of the Empress Eugénie and so was the first homme du monde any of them had ever met.
And so she had gone on reminiscing about her youth and her own home and letting Balint tell her everything he could recall that had happened to her old acquaintances. From time to time she had paused for a moment and imperceptibly the little pauses had grown longer. Balint had had the impression that behind her very real interest in everything he could tell her had lain something else, something that she had been turning over in her mind, uncertain, perhaps, how she could bring up the subject.
Balint had thought that she would probably ask about her other nephew, Laszlo Gyeroffy; but this time her mind had been on something else …
After a little time Countess Elise had fallen silent and had then seemed lost in her own thoughts. Then suddenly she had said, ‘You can have no idea how good it is to hear all this!’ and turning again to her nephew she took his hand and kept it in hers. She seemed to be looking into the far distance.
‘Do you know,’ she had gone on softly as if confiding in him some carefully guarded secret. ‘Do you know that after all these years I still feel that Transylvania is my real home, not here in Northern Hungary. I feel at home there; not here! The people there are my own kind, but here they are somehow like foreigners, like Austrians, like Viennese. Don’t misunderstand me, I am very happy here and my life with Antal beside me has always been a happy one. But that is because I have always loved him so much. We married for love, and I would have married him, and no one else, no matter how poor he might have been or what sort of life he led.’ Then she had paused for a moment before going on: ‘… but all this …’ and she made a wide circular gesture with her hand which somehow embraced, as clearly as if she had spelt it all out, the castle at Jablanka, the vast estates, their assured position in society, ‘all this … this is still not really me. It has always been strange. This world is not my world and has never really become so. Now that I look back on my life I can see that it has been our great love, and only that, which has made our marriage so happy. Not only my love, but his also. It is that which has made everything right and harmonious for both of us. It’s true. It is love, true love, which is the only thing which makes it possible to endure everything and which absolves everything. If we had not had it ours would have been a life of disagreements