They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [165]
‘What can I do for you?’ asked Balint, but he found himself too embarrassed by the encounter to go on. It would have been absurd to greet Laszlo’s mother with some polite formula like ‘How do you do?’ especially as he had met her acting as someone’s servant, or was it worse than that?
He wondered what terrible times she had been through until she had finally ended up like this.
It was true that she showed no signs of degradation, no traces of the life she must have led unless, perhaps, it was to be seen in a faint cynical turn at the corner of her mouth, a little bitter smile that suggested that there was nothing and no one she did not despise, least of all herself. A wilful, stubborn line rose where her eyebrows met.
Then she was asking him all about Transylvania, about her old acquaintances, about the Alvinczys, the Laczoks, whom she referred to by their full names as if they were no relation to her and as if they had not all been her childhood friends and playmates. Obviously she wished to make it clear to him that she no longer belonged to that world, that she no longer deserved to and would not presume even to think so.
All this was said in a calm conversational and conventional matter as if they were talking about matters that did not really in any way concern them. After a while she fell silent.
Then in a deeper tone, very softly but with an underlying force of barely suppressed passion, she asked, ‘How … how is my son?’
It was difficult for Balint to find the right words with which to answer. If only she had still used the light, somewhat distant tones with which she had asked all her other questions he would probably have told her the cruel truth quite openly. He would have said that her son had turned into a depraved drunkard and was bankrupt. He would have told her in the baldest terms – perhaps out of anger, or resentment, or the desire for revenge – that Laszlo’s tragic life had begun that day in his early childhood when he had been deserted by his mother. But Julie Ladossa had spoken to him in that passionate voice, that voice which came from somewhere deep inside her soul; that voice in which could be heard the echo of many years of guilt and remorse, of more than two decades of sorrow and humble acknowledgement of her own fault, and in those half-strangled tones he had recognized the force of her living tragedy.
Therefore he hesitated before answering her questions and, when he did, he did so with compassion. He told the truth, but he did it gently. He did not conceal Laszlo’s sad situation, how he had sold the house and land and now lived on a small pension in one of his former tenants’ houses at Kozard. He said that he had been ill but that Balint believed that he was now a little better, though it was some time since he had seen his cousin who had now broken off all relations with everyone he had known in the past.
‘He too!’ she whispered. ‘So it has happened to him too,’ and she stared ahead of her.
They did not speak for some minutes. Then she got up, saying: ‘From here we are going to St Petersburg. Then to Moscow, Odessa and Bucharest. We shall be in Budapest at the end of February … If you happen to be there … and wouldn’t mind seeing me again … you might perhaps have some news. I would be so grateful!’
‘Of course! I’ll see you with great pleasure!’
‘We shall probably be at the Hungaria, but I’m not sure because the agent arranges everything like that.’
Balint thought that Julie Ladossa would now put out her hand and leave; but she just stood there, without speaking, though she obviously had something on her mind. Her eyes were fixed far, far away and the vertical line on her forehead seemed even more deeply etched than before. Then, speaking swiftly and urgently, she looked at Abady and said, ‘Tell me! Tell me! Do you sometimes see Sandor Kendy, the one they call Crookface?’
‘Of course. Not