They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [152]
At this time he was completely preoccupied with his mother’s illness.
Every day Countess Abady spent more and more time asleep. Even when she was awake she could rarely pay attention for more than half an hour to anything Balint came in to tell her. He would recount news of the horses, or the fallow deer, or, in early February, of the newly born lambs and litters of piglets – every day something different and always something cheerful and amusing, something funny or unexpected, a little joke at which his mother might smile and even occasionally give a little laugh. It always had to be good news or some minor success, but even so she tired fast, and then her attention faded and soon she would again close her eyes.
Balint went to see her just two or three times a day; at midday before luncheon, again in the afternoon when they would have tea together on the glazed-in upper veranda, and sometimes in the early evening when she had been lifted from her wheelchair and put to bed. A young doctor was kept in permanent attendance because had there been any emergency or change in her condition it would have taken too long to get the country physician to drive over from Gyeres. Since the beginning of January there were also two trained nurses, one for the day and the other to watch at night. The two housekeepers, Mrs Tothy and Mrs Baczo, hardly ever left their mistress’s side, for only they could understand her occasional mumbled words. Besides, they knew her habits.
There was little for Balint to do. Indeed his mother seemed not always to notice when he came and went. She never sent for him or spoke about him and often it seemed that she would not notice if he had been absent for several days. All the same he did not dare go away as he was convinced that if he did something dreadful would happen, as when he had gone to the Szekler country in December.
During these long months he cut himself off from the world. All the Co-operative business was done by letter, and the Simo affair, serious and ominous as it had been, was the only thing to have dragged his thoughts away from his mother’s condition.
Everything seemed unreal and remote. He even read the daily papers with the same indifference, only glancing superficially at what was reported each day, which at any other time would have interested him deeply.
The political situation in Budapest grew ever more fraught and potentially dangerous. Party hatred exploded into personal feuds and even Tisza found himself obliged to fight several duels with political opponents who had insulted him. It was always they who were wounded and retired, for Tisza was a better swordsman than most and always emerged unscathed.
Laszlo Lukacs was attacked even more frequently than Tisza. Zoltan Desy in a speech at a public banquet again unloosed the epithet ‘the world’s greatest Panamist’, which everyone now knew to mean ‘scoundrel’ or ‘unscrupulous crook’, at which Lukacs, as Minister-President, took him to court. Whereupon Desy told the world that Lukacs, when Minister of Finance in 1910, had renewed a bank’s salt-shipping contract in return for a donation of several million crowns to Lukacs’s party funds, that he, Desy, knew all the gruesome details, and that this payment had financed Lukacs’s election campaign. In turn Lukacs replied that the renewal of the bank’s contract had in no way added to its profits, that the contribution to party funds had been from simple goodwill and political conviction and that furthermore he, Lukacs, never had, nor ever would have, profited by a single penny.
The publicity did no one any good, even though Lukacs’s personal integrity had been confirmed when Desy lost the case.
But that was not the end of the affair.
The very day the verdict against Desy was proclaimed, Andrassy, Apponyi and