They Were Divided Read online

  WINNER OF THE WEIDENFELD TRANSLATION PRIZE

  Praise for Miklos Banffy

  ‘Bánffy is a born storyteller’ Patrick Leigh Fermor, from the Foreword

  ‘A Tolstoyan portrait of the end days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, this compulsively readable novel follows the divergent fortunes of two cousins, the politician Abady and gamble/drunkard Gyeroffy detailing the intrigues at the decadent Budapest court, the doomed love affairs, opulent balls, duels and general head-in-the sand idiocies of a privileged elite whose world is on the verge of disappearing for ever. Banffy – Hungarian count – also writes with extraordinary vividness of the natural beauty of his Transylvanian homeland. Two more novels – They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided – followed, usually published as The Transylvanian Trilogy’ Adam Newey ‘1000 Novels You Must Read’, Guardian

  ‘Just about as good as any fiction I have ever read, like Anna Karenina and War and Peace rolled into one. Love, sex, town, country, money, power, beauty, and the pathos of a society which cannot prevent its own destruction – all are here’ Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph

  ‘Fascinating. He writes about his quirky border lairds and squires and the high misty forest ridges and valleys of Transylvania with something of the ache that Czeslaw Milosz brings to the contemplation of this lost Eden’ W. L. Webb, Guardian

  ‘Pleasure of a different scale and kind. It is a sort of Galworthisn panorama of life in the dying years of the Habsburg Empire – perfect late night reading for nostalgic romantics like me’ Jan Morris, Observer Books of the Year

  ‘Totally absorbing’ Martha Kearney, Harper’s Bazaar

  ‘Charts this glittering spiral of decline with the frustrated regret of a politician who had tried to alert Hungary’s ruling classes to the pressing need for change and accommodation. Patrician, romantic and in the context of the times a radical, Bánffy combined his politics – he negotiated Hungary’s admission to the League of Nations – with running the state theatres and promoting the work of his contemporary, the composer Béla Bartók’ Guardian Editorial

  ‘Like Joseph Roth and Robert Musil, Miklós Bánffy is one of those novelists Austria-Hungary specialised in. Intimate and sparkling chroniclers of a wider ruin, ironic and elegiac, they understood that in the 1900s the fate of classes and nations was beginning to turn almost on a change in the weather. None of them, oddly, was given his due till long after his death, probably because in 1918 very much was lost in central Europe – an empire overnight for one thing – and the aftermath was like a great ship sinking, a massive downdraught that took a generation of ideas and continuity with it. Bánffy, a prime witness of his times, shows in these memoirs exactly what an extraordinary period it must have been to live through’ Julian Evans, Daily Telegraph

  ‘Full of arresting descriptions, beautiful evocations of scenery and wise political and moral insights’ Francis King, Spectator

  ‘Plunge instead into the cleansing waters of a rediscovered masterpiece, because The Writing on the Wall is certainly a masterpiece, in any language’ Michael Henderson, Daily Telegraph

  ‘So enjoyable, so irresistible, it is the author’s keen political intelligence and refusal to indulge in self-deception which give it an unusual distinction. It’s a novel that, read at the gallop for sheer enjoyment, is likely to carry you along. But many will want to return to it for a second, slower reading, to savour its subtleties and relish the author’s intelligence’ Allan Massie, Scotsman

  ‘So evocative’ Simon Jenkins, Guardian

  ‘Banffy’s loving portrayal of a way of life that was already much diminished by the time he was writing, and set to vanish before he died, is too clear-eyed to be simply nostalgic, yet the ache of loss is certainly here. Laszlo has been brought up a homeless orphan, Balint’s father died when he was young and the whole country is suffering from loss of pride. Although comparisons with Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard are inevitable, Banffy’s work is perhaps nearer in feel to that of Joseph Roth, in The Radetzky March. They were, after all, mourning the fall of the same empire’ Ruth Pavey New Statesman

  THE WRITING ON THE WALL

  (Erdélyi Tőrténet)

  The Transylvanian Trilogy

  by

  MIKLÓS BÁNFFY

  BOOK THREE

  They Were Divided

  Translated by

  PATRICK THURSFIELD and KATALIN BÁNFFY-JELEN

  For my dear children, for whom I first started on this translation of their grandfather’s greatest work so that they should learn to know him better, he who would have loved them so much.

  K. Bánffy-Jelen

  Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  FOREWORD

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  PART TWO

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  PART THREE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  PART FOUR

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  PART FIVE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  PART SIX

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  About the Author

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  by

  PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

  I FIRST DRIFTED into the geographical background of this remarkable book in the spring and summer of 1934, when I was nineteen, half-way through an enormous trudge from Holland to Turkey. Like many travellers, I fell in love with Budapest and the Hungarians, and by the time I got to the old principality of Transylvania, mostly on a borrowed horse, I was even deeper in.

  With one interregnum, Hungary and Transylvania, which is three times the size of Wales, had been ruled by the Magyars for a thousand years. After the Great War, in which Hungary was a loser, the peace treaty took Transylvania away from the Hungarian crown and allotted it to the Romanians, who formed most of the population. The whole question was one of hot controversy, which I have tried to sort out and explain in a book called Between the Woods and the Water* largely to get things clear in my own mind; and, thank heavens, there is no need to go over it again in a short foreword like this. The old Hungarian landowners felt stranded and ill-used by history; nobody likes having a new nationality forced on them, still less losing estates by expropriation. This, of course, is what happened to the descendants of the old feudal landowners of Transylvania.

  By a fluke, and through friends I had made in Budapest and on the Great Hungarian Plain, I found myself wandering from castle to castle in what had been left of these age-old fiefs.

  Hardly a trace of this distress was detectable to a stranger. In my case, the chief thing to survive is the memory of unlimited kindness. Though enormously reduced, remnants of these old estates did still exist, and at moments it almost seemed as though nothing had changed. Charm and douceur de vivre were still afloat among the faded décor and the still undiminished libraries, and, out of doors, everything conspired to delight. Islanded in the rustic Romanian multitude, different in race and religious practice – the Hungarians were Catholics or Calvinists, the Romanians Orthodox or Uniate – and, with the phantoms of their lost ascendency still about them, the prevailing atmosphere conjured up the tumbling demesnes of the Anglo-Iri
sh in Waterford or Galway with all their sadness and their magic. Homesick for the past, seeing nothing but their own congeners on the neighbouring estates and the few peasants who worked there, they lived in a backward-looking, a genealogical – almost a Confucian – dream, and many sentences ended in a sigh.

  It was in the heart of Transylvania – in the old princely capital then called Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca) that I first came across the name of Bánffy. It was impossible not to. Their palace was the most splendid in the city, just as Bonczhida was the pride of the country and both of them triumphs of the baroque style. Ever since the arrival of the Magyars ten centuries ago, the family had been foremost among the magnates who conducted Hungarian and Transylvanian affairs, and their portraits – with their slung dolmans, brocade tunics, jewelled scimitars and fur kalpaks with plumes like escapes of steam – hung on many walls.

  For five years of the 1890s, before any of the disasters had smitten, a cousin of Count Miklós Bánffy had led the government of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The period immediately after, from 1905, is the book’s setting. The grand world he describes was Edwardian Mitteleuropa. The men, however myopic, threw away their spectacles and fixed in monocles. They were the fashionable swells of Spy and late du Maurier cartoons, and their wives and favourites must have sat for Boldini and Helleu. Life in the capital was a sequence of parties, balls and race-meetings, and, in the country, of grandes battues where the guns were all Purdeys. Gossip, cigar-smoke and Anglophilia floated in the air; there were cliques where Monet, d’Annunzio and Rilke were appraised; hundreds of acres of forest were nightly lost at chemin de fer; at daybreak lovers stole away from tousled four-posters through secret doors, and duels were fought, as they still were when I was there. The part played by politics suggests Trollope or Disraeli. The plains beyond flicker with mirages and wild horses, ragged processions of storks migrate across the sky; and even if the woods are full of bears, wolves, caverns, waterfalls, buffalos and wild lilac, the country scenes in Transylvania, oddly enough, remind me of Hardy.

  Bánffy is a born story-teller. There are plots, intrigues, a murder, political imbroglios and passionate love-affairs, and though this particular counterpoint of town and country may sound like the stock-in-trade of melodrama, with a fleeting dash of Anthony Hope, it is nothing of the kind. But it is, beyond question, dramatic. Patrick Thursfield and Kathy Bánffy-Jelen have dealt brilliantly with the enormous text; and the author’s life and thoughtful cast of mind emerge with growing clarity. The prejudices and the follies of his characters are arranged in proper perspective and only half-censoriously, for humour and a sense of the absurd come to the rescue. His patriotic feelings are totally free of chauvinism, just as his instinctive promptings of tribal responsibility have not a trace of vanity. They urge him towards what he thought was right, and always with effect. (He was Minister of Foreign Affairs at a critical period in the 1920s.) If a hint of melancholy touches the pages here and there, perhaps this was inevitable in a time full of omens, recounted by such a deeply civilized man.

  Chatsworth, Boxing Day, 1998

  * John Murray, 1980.

  ‘And the fingers went on writing in letters of fire upon the plaster of the Wall of the King’s palace. And the third word was UPHARSIN – thy kingdom shall be divided.

  ‘But none could read the writing so drunk were they with much drinking of wine, and they wasted the Lord’s vessels of gold and silver which their ancestors had laid up in the house of the Lord, and they argued with each other praising their false gods made of gold and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood and of clay until there was no strength left in them.

  ‘And the armies of the Medes and Persians stood ready before the walls of the city and in the same night everyone within it was slain.’

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  BALINT ABADY STEPPED QUIETLY into the family box at the theatre at Kolozsvar. Even though he knew it well, for the Abadys like all the other old families in the district rented the same box every year, he still had to grope his way in the darkness to hang up his coat. Still somewhat blinded by the light from the stage he sat down in the best seat facing the stage, for his mother had stayed at home at Denestornya. Balint himself had driven up from the country, just for one night, because he wanted to see the gala performance of Madam Butterfly that was being given that evening, and especially the Butterfly herself, the famous Yvonne de Tréville, who often came from the Opéra Comique to sing in Kolozsvar.

  He was late and the great love duet that closes the first act was just beginning. The music throbbed with passion, with love and desire; the sweet tones of the violins carried Puccini’s soaring melodies and above it all was the pure smooth voice of the French diva.

  Balint was on the point of surrendering to the music when he felt himself overcome by a strange feeling of agitation, as if he were in the presence of an overpowering force, a force even more potent than the storm of emotion that was being enacted before him on the stage. It was like an electric shock to his nervous system and something, he knew not what, made him turn round.

  Adrienne Miloth was sitting in the next box, almost directly behind him.

  He was startled to see her there because he had heard that she had gone to Switzerland with her daughter and he had not thought she would have returned so soon. This evening he saw that she and her sister Margit were guests in the kindly old Countess Gyalakuthy’s box. There she sat; and though she was so close she seemed as insubstantial as a phantom.

  Her face was lit only by the moonlight from the stage which cast the faintest glow on her delicately aquiline nose, her cheeks and her generous mouth. Balint could just see the pale sheen of her skin where the neck and shoulders merged into the deep décolleté of her silver dress. Everything else was hidden in the darkness of the theatre.

  She was looking straight ahead, quite motionless, as still as a marble statue. In the reflection of the cunningly contrived moonlight on the stage Adrienne’s eyes shone emerald green; and she sat there rigidly, without moving a muscle, though he could hardly believe that she had not seen him come in because he had sat down just in front of her. They were so close that with only the slightest movement their arms would have touched.

  Balint felt that he could not stay there another moment. It would be impossible for him, for them both, to sit next to each other and behave as if they were strangers. How could they listen together to that passionate music which spoke so eloquently of desire and love and desperate yearning? No! No! No! He must not stay! He could not stay!

  The memories of their love so overwhelmed him that he found himself trembling. He got up silently and slipped out of the box, reeling slightly like a man who has been struck a heavy blow.

  Though he could not sit next to her he still could not leave the theatre in which she sat; so he descended the great stair, crossed to the other side of the auditorium and, with his coat on, stepped through one of the doors and stood at the side of the stalls in the shadow of the balcony. No one would be able to see him there, he thought, so he would remain until the act came to an end and then slip out before the lights went up. From there, too, he could gaze at Adrienne whom he had not seen for more than a year: and even then it had been a mere glance from afar.

  She did not seem changed. Maybe her face was a little thinner, perhaps there was a trace of bitterness about the lines of her mouth, but she was still supremely beautiful, every aspect of her as lovely as when she had been his love, his friend, his companion in body and spirit, in those days when they had planned to become husband and wife. But an implacable fate had separated them.

  In his imagination he saw her stripped of that shining metallic gown, bright as a suit of armour, standing naked before him as she first had five long years before in Venice, then so often afterwards in their little hut in the forest, or at the Uzdy villa, or at her father’s house at Mezo-Varjas, or in Budapest, indeed anywhere their homeless love could find refuge. Balint’s heart contracted with bit
terness when he thought once again of how he had been forced to abandon her and how she had ordered him to marry Lili Illesvary whom she herself had picked out for him.

  Adrienne had then made her conditions: their affair must cease, and she would not even meet him socially unless he got married and so erected a barrier between them. He had found he could not comply and so they had not seen each other again.

  The love duet continued, growing ever more intense, more impassioned. For a moment its message of love and desire was overshadowed by two brief echoes deep in the orchestral texture of the music with which the Shinto priest had cursed the lovers’ happiness; and when he heard it Balint felt most poignantly that it symbolized the story of their own doomed love. However this sad reflection did not last long, for that song of yearning flowed out from the stage, stronger than ever, irresistible and triumphant. It was as if the whole wide world was composed of spring and moonlight, blossom and sublime melody. As the music mounted to its stormy climax Balint felt as moved and shattered as by the climax of love. It was the music of their past, now forever denied them.

  The curtain fell to a tornado of applause, and Balint slipped quietly out.

  The October night air was already cold. The sky was clear and the pavements glistened from the light rain that had fallen that afternoon. Without thinking where he was going Balint started to walk towards the centre of the town. He walked at random, with no object except to be alone, alone with the torment of all those thoughts by which he had been assailed that evening. Glancing at his watch he saw that it was just a quarter past nine. This gave him nearly three hours of freedom, for at midnight he was expected to go to supper at the house of the Prefect, who, as general director of the Kolozsvar theatres, was giving a party after the performance in honour of the French diva. For three hours, then, he could try to walk off his chagrin, to master that surge of bitterness that had been stirred up by the sight of Adrienne sitting so close to him.