Nightingale (37 page)

The gardens were geometric, enclosed by high walls. After a desultory stroll, Klara would sit, bolt upright in the confinement of stays and panniers, a piece of embroidery in a frame before her. This had been a task enforced and loathed in childhood, but now, especially when she was with Max and his friends, it was a wonderful woman's defense. Here, she created something lovely. Concentrating, she was able to lose herself.

Today was different. She and Akos had decided that she would dress as an ordinary German woman, a musician's wife. She had, among her costumes, leather stays, embroidered aprons, ankle length petticoats and plain buckled shoes, like those that any
gute Frau
might wear. To complete the demure picture, Klara coiled her glorious auburn hair into a tidy braided crown and covered it with a close white cap.

"Wait until Klara sees the Great Alfold," Ferenc said to Amalie, who smiled as she thought of it. "The Alford are the plains of the East, absolutely flat. So flat that the world looks like two opposing slabs. One is blue sky, the other, grass."

"Does Prince Vehnsky travel there often?"

"He used to go once a year, but not so often these days. His son, Count Bela, manages those estates for him."

***

The town began to celebrate May Day. It began with Mass and perhaps some repentance for doings of the night past, when young people had slipped away to gather flowers in the greening woods. A fir trunk, stripped of branches and made slippery with soap
, was erected in the center square of the town. A bottle of bikaver was suspended at the top, and the strongest, most athletic men tried to climb the pole and to claim the prize, while a crowd laughed, took bets and watched. There were singers, dancers and games. Everyone wore their gayest clothes. The women's skirts were stiff with bright embroidery.

Groups of young people wandered. That the women were unmarried was obvious from their neatly braided, flower-crowned heads. Klara was interested to see that married women, their hair modestly covered by heavily embroidered scarves and caps, followed close behind. It seemed today, in this daylight, that lovers could no longer disappear into the privacy of the forest. When she said as much to Akos, he said that Magyars were very strict with their daughters, and that the young people walking together were already formally engaged.

"How do they manage their courting?"

"There is a spinning and weaving room somewhere in the town and in the evenings the marriageable girls gather there and work under the supervision of a chaperon. Any bachelors who visit are those who have permission from the girls’ parents."

"It is very strict," Amalie agreed. “Peasants anywhere are strict," she added. She was a musician's daughter, and Klara was learning she had been brought up in a far more worldly manner than these rural maids.

"When we return, will you go to a spinning room in town to look for a wife, Karoly?" Klara turned and asked the younger of the two soldiers.

They were taking their supper in the garden behind their little inn. On every side, villagers were celebrating.

Karoly only flushed and looked uncomfortable, and Sandor, good-naturedly teasing, answered for him. "He will. His mother has a girl all picked out."

"Will you go with us to Komorom?" Klara asked. She was sensed there was a long story here, especially when Karoly seemed so embarrassed, but she also sensed that more would be prying.

"Only to Vac, Frau Almassy."

"Then my best wishes to you,"

"Yes. He's far too handsome a fellow not to be married," Amalie said with a wink.

Czechs, Slovenes, Magyars and Germans shared the fun today in Nosonmagyarova. Somewhere down by the docks, the Germans had a Biergarten, where they ate wurst and poured down steins of beer. Loud drinking songs came roaring up the street.

It was then Klara noticed an odd-looking couple, black-haired and skinny, passing among the tables. Their teeth, oddly white against their dark skin, flashed when they smiled. Their colorful clothes and the heaps of necklaces and great round hoop earrings the woman wore marked them as different.

"What folk are those?" She had just finished eating a dinner of noodles and spicy gulyas. To indulge a sharp craving for something green, she'd also eaten a side-dish of boiled dandelion greens with a plentiful addition of salt, pepper and vinegar. This was a plain dish she hadn't tasted since Saint Cecilia's.

"Why, those are Gypsies. Have you never seen any?"

"Well, I've heard of them. Signor Manzoli talked about them and they figure in plays and operas, but I have never seen real ones."

"You will see plenty of them in Hungary." Akos smiled at her.

"Yes," Ferenc said with contempt. "They roam all over, the raggedy theives, like cockroaches. I hope our hosts have got their doors locked, for they steal everything that isn't nailed down, including children. The rest of ‘em are probably sneaking into unguarded houses."

Diners at a nearby table made the sign of the cross at the woman's approach, hissed in Magyar, and waved her away.

"Carrion crow! Be off!"

Bowing, a fist raised to the forehead in a kind of eastern salute, and with a smile frozen in place, the woman moved away.

"What does she offer?" Klara watched after the woman.

"Fortunes, no doubt."

Klara, remembering Manzoli’s charts, those charts in which he so implicitly believed, experienced a prickle at the back of her neck. What he had said about Akos!

"Do you suppose she can really tell the future?" She'd never told Almassy about Manzoli's love for fortune telling, and certainly not about his inferences during their last private meeting at his apartment.

"Some gypsies are charlatans, certainly, but some seem to be born with something far greater than a knack for a good guess," Almassy said. "I had one give me a reading when I was little that was terrifying."

"I was there, too, if you remember," Ferenc said, his eyes flashing. "That damned witch!"

Amalie slipped a plump arm around her husband's shoulder to soothe him. "Now, dear one, it's not as if the woman caused those things to happen."

"It was something neither of us will ever forget." Almassy tried to catch his friend’s eye again, but Ferenc pointedly looked away.

"What happened?" It was clear to Klara that her friends were all made anxious by the Gypsies.

"She told me that I would be surrounded on all sides by death and yet would not die. Three months later, I'd lost both my parents and a brother and a sister." Remembering, Ferenc shook his head.

"It was a contagion." Amalie stroked her husband's arm. "You almost died yourself. My grandmother Berthe also died of it."

Neither man said more. The soldiers, Karoly and Sandor shook their heads, then crossed themselves. Klara understood they'd heard the story before.

She continued, surreptitiously to watch the couple and saw that not everyone was hostile to them. In fact, two women, widows in black, went to sit close to the gypsies as they perched on the low stone wall that surrounded the inn's garden. After presenting coins, they watched attentively while an embroidered cloth was laid on top of the wall. Next, a large deck of cards appeared from within the woman’s leather pouch.

Ferenc stared blackly at them. "I wouldn't go near those creatures for a thousand ducats."

Amalie, still soothing him, agreed. "Yes, why should anyone go to a fortune teller? It is far better not to know. After all, what awaits us all in the end but aches and pains, gray hair and death?"

Klara sighed. She continued to study the gypsy woman and her clients. The cards, she could see, were larger than regular playing cards and brightly colored.

"I am sorry about whatever happened, Ferenc," Klara finally said, turning back to her new friend. "You must have suffered terribly. Were you young?"

"Ten. Akos and I dared each other to go to the gypsies when they passed by the Prince’s hunting lodge one spring."

"Yes, we saved the money. When we heard from the grooms that they had come – stable hands always kept a sharp eye out for them because they are famous horse thieves – we went to find them."

"What did you want to know?"

"Well, we both loved music. I wanted to know if I would get into the Prince's orchestra and be taken into his household, or if I would be sent back to labor as my father did, upon the land. I wanted no part of that, you see, because I was small for my age. Farming seemed far too hard to me."

"Besides," Akos added, "Ferenc loved reading and music. A farmer has no time for such things."

"And why did you go, Akos? You were already playing in the Prince's orchestra, weren't you?"

"Yes, but my grandfather was dead set against my continuing."

Karoly and Sandor nodded. Klara realized they must have all grown up together on the Vehnsky estate. There was probably very little they didn’t know about one another.

"Grandfather Almassy made me spend part of every day with him, working in his garden, or helping with his treatments. Not that I minded. I liked that, too, but I didn't want to be kept from music. Grandfather said that if I tended the garden and helped him that would please him. Still, I didn't want to be a full time apothecary and only a part-time musician."

"Your grandfather was also against your military training." Sandor, absently fiddling with his fork, remarked.

"True," Akos said, "but the Prince had the last word."

"And a good thing he did," Klara said. "Otherwise, I don't think we would have escaped that night Oettingen's men came after us in the street."

"Akos is annoyingly good at that, too." Ferenc shook his head and smiled.

"His head is swollen big enough," Karoly said with a tolerant smile. "Don't make it worse."

"What did your gypsy look like?"

"She was old and withered and bad smelling. Her hands were like dirty claws."

"She was inside a dark tent with just one candle burning," Akos said, "and we were terrified before she even started. We’d felt very grown up until we saw her."

"I went first," Akos said. "And my fortune was not bad. She said I'd get my wish, but it was a little scary when she said that I had two strong men pulling me in opposite directions, which was true. Then she laid out Ferenc's cards. By the time she turned up the cards of Death and the Broken Tower, our hair was standing on end."

"We ran out of there like rabbits."

"Yes, but the worst was that within a month, the contagion began."

Akos nodded. For a few minutes, there was silence. Klara wished she hadn’t pursued the matter. A shadow seemed to fall across the bright evening sky.

"That's how they came to be such good friends.” Sandor broke the silence.

"When his Grandfather Almassy learned that no one from the village would go into Ferenc's house," Amalie explained, "he went there himself. Ferenc was raving with fever
– everyone else was dead. Akos helped put Ferenc in the back of their pony cart. They took him to a little hut in the woods Grandfather Almassy cared for him, or he would have died, too. There was so much fear that many died from plain neglect."

Klara nodded. She had heard such tales, but never from people who were so intimately involved. She noted that the men had withdrawn from what was obviously an unhappy memory, leaving Amalie to finish the tale. It was easy to allow their attention to wander to a bout of arm wrestling between two brawny working men, just a few tables away.

Bets were handed around, and a company of spectators gathered. Apparently, this was a long standing rivalry. Shouting and boasting grew loud. When the men excused themselves and moved off to watch, Klara found her attention wandering back again to the gypsies, who were still sitting on the stone wall, now reading for a man with a heavily scarred face.

Klara had found herself thinking more and more about her own future. She had left Vienna knowing that she was going into exile. There would be no return to the glittering capital while Max lived. And she knew that their unrestrained love making had quickly taken effect. She had embraced another great danger in embracing her handsome husband
– childbirth!

How would she fare? Max had taught her to fear it and had had women show her ways to avoid it, but with Akos she had not even used the simple trick of the sponge.

Suddenly, the image of Madame Wranitzsky crossed her mind. Was she installed now in all the best roles, with the most generous protector in all of Europe? Happy as Klara had been since she'd left Max and Vienna, that happiness was not unalloyed.

Perhaps this fortune teller could tell her?

Even if it was bad, she reasoned, it would prepare her for what was to come. She wasn't sure that she agreed with Amalie about preferring ignorance.

Klara watched while the gypsies entertained a steady stream of customers. Finally, reaching into her pocket, through the opening in the petticoat, Klara began to finger the small coins she carried.

Nearby, the rough and tumble of arm-wrestling had changed to an actual wrestling match. The crowd moved further away to accommodate the action, out into a side street. A quieter group remained behind in the garden. Voices rose in song. From a little distance she could see Akos and Ferenc gesturing, offering to bring out their fiddles. When the suggestion was well received, they excused themselves and went into the inn. Klara and Amalie were now quite alone.