They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [150]
‘That’s just it! Try as I may I have to admit that for years you’ve tried to help my people. I’ve seen it for a long time. But why do you do it? What is behind it? What are you up to? It’s all just some trick, I know.’
‘Oh, come! You don’t really believe that, do you?’
Timbus’s face darkened. Speaking almost as if to himself, he said, ‘N-no, but I wish I did!’ Then he went on angrily, ‘It is absurd, ridiculous. For a Hungarian lord to help our people, why it’s the very opposite of all I’ve been taught to believe. It contradicts everything I’ve ever learned and what I want to believe, everything I’ve worked for, everything I believe to be true. It’s absurd … just absurd!’
‘Not at all. Why, old Juon himself, Kula’s grandfather, told me that there was a time when all the mountain people had the greatest faith and trust in my grandfather. You must have been told of this too. I myself remember, though I was only a child then, how often so many of your people came to him with their problems asking for his advice or getting him to settle their disputes. He acted as a sort of judge for them, and they always had faith in his judgement.’
‘That’s just what the old people say: but they’re stupid, credulous. They understand nothing and they’ve forgotten that they were nothing but serfs, slaves who were forced to work and flogged if they didn’t. And who exploited them? You did, you powerful Hungarian lords!’
‘They were never slaves! All right, let’s talk about the serfs. They themselves were all equal whether they were Romanian or Hungarian. They hung together, like everyone of the same station in life. It was the same all over Europe and no one then thought of it in racial or nationalistic terms. And it’s pure legend that any landowner would exploit his own serfs. It would have been dead against his own best interests. What a landowner wanted was to have contented people working for him. In times of war the lords would fight with other lords and then they destroyed each others’ lands, and your opponents’ serfs would suffer too. But not your own, never!’
Timbus tried to answer Balint’s words in a flood of exasperated argument, going over the whole hotly debated question of the ancient Dacians and their descendants, the Romanians, who had occupied that land since the times of the Romans. He quoted Sinka, Anonymus, Hasdeu and Xenophon. In broken phrases which poured out in confusion, new ones starting before the last was finished, he tried to evoke all those multifarious tomes of ancient political theory which had been written to prove what he had so eagerly absorbed, namely that a Latin civilization had flourished in Transylvania long before the arrival of the conquering Hungarian hordes. He spoke with such passion that he was soon shouting at his host.
He was stopped by a fit of coughing, a dreadful racking cough which seemed to break him in two, as he crouched in his chair with a handkerchief pressed to his mouth. It was a dry gasping fit which seemed to tear his lungs apart. When, at long last, it abated and he was able to straighten up again, he leaned back in his chair in total exhaustion.
Balint would have liked to reply that, long before the Hungarians arrived in the ancient province of Dacia, Transylvania had repeatedly been overrun by Goths, Vandals, Gepids, Avars and other barbarian tribes and a full six hundred years had passed between the time when the Emperor Aurelian withdrew his legions and the arrival of the Hungarians. And during these six hundred years the history of Transylvania had only been that of a highway whose path was trodden by countless nomads who came that way and then passed on. He would have liked to add that there existed no records and no traces of any indigenous culture, but he stopped himself because when Timbus dropped his handkerchief in his lap Balint saw that it was stained with blood, not just a drop