The Phoenix Land (22 page)

In my little room I could only get a proper distance from her by seating her on the table and myself on the windowsill. In this way I did three small portraits of her. It took me three or four days.

This had an unexpected result.

One evening, as I was on my way down the dark corridor to tackle the set meal in the hotel dining room, I was addressed by a broad, heavy, elderly woman, who asked if I were the ‘Monsieur Banfi’ who lived on that floor. I bowed, and she went on to ask: ‘How much would you charge to do a portrait of me, such as I saw in your room?’

‘You see,’ she explained, ‘yesterday, when I went by, they were making up your room and the door was open … and I saw the ones you had been doing…’

I had to think quickly. I did not want to ask too much in case it discouraged her; but not too little either, or my work would be held of little value. So I asked for two hundred florins, which would be more than enough to keep me for the next two weeks. Of course she started to bargain, and we finally decided on one hundred and fifty. That was agreed. Tomorrow in her rooms at the hotel? That was agreed too, and I said I would be there at four o’clock.

She received me in her living room, dressed in her best clothes. She wore a dress of dark-blue silk brocade with a cascade of fine lace at the neck. I looked at her carefully. She was one those women from Java which Dutchmen living in the colonies often married and brought home, where they were at once accepted and received in Dutch society without a hint of discrimination. Once in Holland they often moved in the highest society, and there were not a few
Jongheers
with Javanese mothers or grandmothers. This is just another instance of the wisdom of the Dutch in not
treating
their colonial subjects as social pariahs but rather accepted them with the respect due to another human being. As a result they have kept their colonial possessions without the aid of large sea or land forces, and this despite the fact that Java and Borneo are rich and eminently desirable colonies.

We soon established the pose, which had to be both
comfortable
and also cast the least possible shadows on the face (this last
so as to diminish the wrinkles – although I did not say that to her).

It proved to be a most interesting challenge. The broad face with its jutting cheekbones gave her an almost Chinese look, which was enhanced by her hooded oriental eyelids. Although she was no longer young, her hair was still as black as soot and as smooth and shining as if she were wearing a satin helmet.

She sat as calmly as an eastern idol and never uttered a word. As a result, I was able to make swift progress with her picture, even though I never made her sit more than an hour or so at a time so as not to tire her.

I had been at it for about three days when her husband came to see us. He was a thickset, fair-haired Dutchman who was already balding. He had all the corpulence of prosperous good living emphasized by a massive watch chain. Without any form of greeting he stepped behind me, looked at the
half-finished
painting, stared at it for a while and then walked over to his wife. They then spoke to each other briefly in some language I did not know but which sounded like the twitter of small birds interspersed by an occasional click. After a few words the lady turned to me and asked ‘Do you usually stop at teatime? Because if you do I will order you a cup of chocolate.’ Then added with emphatic generosity: ‘Chocolate … with whipped cream!’ The man then nodded to me significantly as if to say: ‘You see, we don’t begrudge such extravagance to a poor painter!’

Of course I accepted with pleasure not only because of the chocolate but also because I saw he liked my picture. (I have to admit that I had to some extent flattered my sitter, much as the good Aarlof used to do).

From then on I got my chocolate every afternoon and, five days later, the watercolour portrait of the lady was finished, and it only remained for me to fill in the background in my own room. When I delivered it there was a great family conference; they looked at it from every angle and in every light, and then they started off again in the bird-twitter language. Finally the man turned back to me and said: ‘My wife has a lovely diamond brooch. Could it still be included in the portrait?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I just need to see it pinned on.’ So she went to fetch her ‘broosh’. It turned out to be a tiny diamond surrounded by arabesque scrolls; pinned into the loose folds of lace it almost disappeared. I knew at once that if painted as it was this little drop of a ‘broosh’ wouldn’t have the effect they so clearly wanted. At once I said I would paint it back in my room because only there did I have the right sort of paint.

‘You don’t have to take the “broosh” with you, do you?’ asked the lady with barely concealed anxiety. ‘Oh, no! I can do it from memory,’ I reassured her and returned to my room.

I painted in the brooch twice as large as it was, and the
diamond
four times its real size. After a quarter of an hour I returned to the couple, and they were overjoyed. Again they looked at it from every angle and in every light. Finally the
husband
patted my shoulder in the most cordial manner and said: ‘Don’t you think…’ By now he had already called me his dear friend and went on: ‘don’t you think that the diamond is really a little bigger? Not much, but just a little bit?’

He looked at me so beseechingly that, even though I knew he knew very well that it was not bigger at all but actually much smaller, I realized his words really meant ‘Please. For my sake, make it bigger!’

Naturally I did what he asked. After admitting I had got it wrong I went back to my room and painted in a stone on the lady’s bosom that looked as if the Kohinoor had whelped. When they saw it they were enchanted. The next day I handed over the picture, framed and mounted and was immediately and
gratefully
paid. Furthermore, the husband lost no time in
commissioning
a portrait of himself and another of his mother; and this time he did not quibble at two hundred florins … which just goes to show how true is the saying, ‘One good deed deserves another’!

This little tale is one of my favourite memories from that time, which is why I have related it at such length. Later it was to have rather an amusing sequel.

Two years later the artist Ede Telcs, who had been unable to find work in Budapest, accepted a post at Begheer’s silver shop in Amsterdam as a sculptor of small objects. Before the war I had
a seen lot of Telcs and his family when I had designed the
pediment
for the statue of Queen Elisabeth he had made for the
commemorative
exhibition. One day, on returning to Budapest after representing Hungary at some conference abroad, I was telling him about my adventures in Holland, and he at once told me that his daughter had met the Javanese lady and seen the portrait in her apartment. By chance the lady asked her if she knew the Hungarian painter ‘Mr Banfi’. ‘Of course,’ the girl had replied. ‘He is Count Bánffy, our present foreign minister!’

‘Oh, no! That’s not him!’ replied the lady. ‘
Our
painter was a
very modest unpretentious sort of man!
’

In vain did Telcs’ daughter explain that she knew it for sure, and even recognized my signature. Then I had been a refugee, now I was a minister. But the old lady would not be
convinced
. It was impossible:
her
poor painter was someone quite different!

As it happened, those commissioned portraits were never to be painted, for on the very same evening I received a telegram from István Bethlen. There were just three words:
RETURN AT ONCE
!

I knew immediately what this meant: it meant the Soviet regime in Budapest was collapsing, it meant returning home, it meant the end of exile and of homelessness; and it might even mean a return to Transylvania, my native land.

Even so, when, after hurriedly packing, getting visas and saying goodbyes, the train steamed out of the station in The Hague, and that enchanting city faded from view beyond the wide green meadows, the joy and hope engendered by my going home was tempered with sorrow: sorrow that I was leaving this place where I had lived for many months comparatively free of care, sheltered from the storms of the great world and engaged in simple honest work. As the train clattered through the growing darkness, racing towards the east along the endless straight railway track, I was subconsciously aware that it was taking me to new responsibilities, to trials and disappointments,
to live surrounded by passion and hatred, to the acceptance of heavy duties, and maybe also to joyless and possibly fruitless struggles.

Chapter Eleven

Vienna had changed a great deal since I had spent a few days there the previous January. The volunteer officers’ guard that had closed the Hofburg and transformed it into an impregnable citadel in the centre of the city had dispersed as soon as the monarch and his family, under the protection of an English
military
escort, had left for Switzerland. Perhaps this had been a wise move, since the emperor’s continued presence in an
increasingly
Red Vienna might have put their lives in danger, and it may well have been this thought that persuaded him not to follow the example of Prince Ruprecht, heir to the throne of Bavaria, who sat out the short-lived Soviet rule there, and that of the
Bulgarian
King Boris, who never left home either. I do not know enough about the reasons that persuaded King Karl to leave, and I have had no means of checking the contradictory explanations I have heard from other people
46
.

What, however, is certain is that after the king’s departure those who had remained loyal to the dynasty, along with many other conservatives, were seen no more. Whether they had retired to their country properties or gone to live in small
provincial
towns, they had somehow vanished from sight –
disappeared
! Simultaneously the government of
Deutsch-Oesterreich
leaned ever more to the left.

The Communist government in Budapest had been making as much propaganda as possible in Vienna, and if they had
succeeded
in gaining power there, as they might well have at the time of the Bolshevik uprising in Bavaria, they might easily have soon held sway over the whole of Middle Europe.

As it was, the Communists had made two attempts to seize power in Austria, and could well have gained the upper hand if
Schober, then head of the police and later chancellor of the republic, had not acted with speed, energy and good sense to frustrate their repeated efforts. Schober’s position with regard to the weak and vacillating Renner-Bauer administration was never easy because most of the so-called political ‘leaders’ at that time never for a moment forgot the possibility that Bolshevism might win the day, and so, to save their own skins no matter what
transpired
, they took care to keep good on terms with both sides. It was a form of life insurance. Perhaps they were merely obeying the adage
‘Nichts Gewisses weiss man nicht’
– ‘Nothing is certain you don’t know for sure’, as my poor grandmother used to say in intentionally bad German.

Then, in the first days of May, Schober managed to lay his hands on some documents which contained proof of Béla Kun’s subversive activities in the Austrian capital, and these he laid before the government in Vienna to show the extent to which its own power, together with their own persons, was in danger. It was from this moment that Schober was given a free hand in combating the Bolshevik propaganda with proper energy … and also treating the plight of the Hungarian refugees with more sympathy than they had hitherto received.

This welcome development came about as a result of an unpremeditated and risky enterprise.

At that time there was a whole cohort of refugee Hungarian army officers in Vienna under the leadership of Colonel Count Takács-Tholvay, who headed the military committee which had taken over after Austria had been separated from Hungary. A group of these officers somehow discovered that a Hungarian Soviet commissar called Fenyö, was coming to Vienna and bringing with him a huge sum of money – many millions, it seemed – destined to finance a Communist uprising in Vienna. They had also learned that this Fenyö was bringing with him the holy crown of Hungary which, it was rumoured, the
Communists
were anxious to smuggle abroad to sell. (This last rumour had even reached us in Holland, where, with the help of Elek Nagy and Thyssen-Bornemissza, we had formed a committee to buy up St Stephen’s Crown, should it turn up for sale
somewhere
, so as to make sure it did not fall into the wrong hands and
forever become irrecoverable. Alberge, the famous Amsterdam antique dealer, had promised me to keep an eye on the world antiquarian market for us.)

The officers in exile contacted some Hungarian politicians then living in the Hotel Bristol (this was the most prestigious and adventurous group of exiles to whom I shall return later) and these enlisted the help of an English journalist who, although not only as a favour, agreed to act as if he were an English diplomat
47
.

On 2 May the officers broke into the Soviet Hungarian Embassy, locked up a few employees they found there and waited until midnight, when Commissar Fenyö arrived and was caught by them. He had not brought St Stephen’s Crown, but he did have the money, amounting to some 135 million in various foreign currencies and ‘blue money’
48
.

They then locked up the commissar and found a safe place for the money (which was later used to finance
counterrevolutionary
activities in Austria and Hungary). Finally they took a look at all the documents they could find; and here they were in luck. On the next day when, after a complaint from Béla Kun, the Austrians came to arrest them, they were able to
furnish
the chief of police with written proof of the subversive plots which had been hatched in the Soviet Hungarian Embassy. These not only included their detailed plans for overthrowing the Austrian government by force but also for robbing a bank next to the Bankgasse offices by means of an underground tunnel. A few days later the Viennese police released the Hungarian officers on bail.

It was directly after this that Schober turned his full offensive against the Communist propaganda and started treating the Hungarian exiles with benevolent neutrality.

At that time there were many Hungarian refugees in Vienna. As well as hundreds of army officers and a quantity of eminent politicians, there were also members of parliament, dismissed government officials and civil service employees, and many others who, although they had never been concerned with
politics, were in danger of imprisonment because of their social position or wealth.

Those eminent exiled politicians who had grouped themselves under the leadership of István Bethlen were in regular touch with the ‘national’ government in Szeged
49
, sending officers and information there.

At the time of my arrival their headquarters in Vienna were in a narrow little office in one of the houses in Lugeck Square, next to busy Roteturmstrasse. However, it was possible to get there by way of the many small streets and passages that are to be found everywhere in Vienna, and this meant that one could arrive by at least ten different ways and leave by ten others. This office had to be manned at all hours, for, although the police closed their eyes to the activities of the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries, they did nothing to protect them. And the Reds, fully aware that serious work was being done there against them, had already tried several times to force their way in.

It was a strange time then in Vienna. While the Austrian authorities took no notice, a serious battle was being waged between the civilian Hungarian refugees and the subversive Communist agents from Budapest. Everyone carried a gun, for, although the dimly-lit streets of Vienna seemed peaceful enough, we still had to take evasive action if we sensed that we were being followed, turning to face whomever it was and
waiting
until he had passed by. In one or two restaurants we would find some Reds dining at another table, and so we would have to keep a wary eye on those who were watching us while seeming to sip our beer light-heartedly with some of those Hungarian ladies who had followed their husbands to Vienna.

These last were mostly young and pretty, for it was only the young who were prepared to risk this often-perilous exile. There was an amusing tale about how one of them got to Vienna, a tale that shows how enterprising a clever woman can be.

Together with her husband, she had been in hiding in a country house near Györ. They decided they would try to escape across the border to Austria, and so her husband, who was wise in the ways of the world, at once started to investigate all possible means of escape. He pored over innumerable train
timetables, taking many notes, and, after much thought, decided that it would be best if they took separate trains to Bruck and met there at the bridge which formed the frontier. He declared that all would go well provided she learned his lessons well. This she did, to the point of getting bored with her husband’s endless
repetition
of his instructions. On the following day he left to take the train from Györ, while the wife took another to Ovár. She arrived at Bruck according to plan, but her husband did not, despite the fact that it had been he who for several days had been telling her what to do. It had been he who had gone on repeating ‘Now don’t miss the train! What on earth will I do if you don’t turn up? I’ll die of worry. For Heaven’s sake, use your head for once!’ and many other remarks even less flattering. And then it was he who failed to turn up. The clever intelligent man had boarded the wrong train and was taken to Sopron instead.

In the meantime the wife had to wait. She was dressed as a peasant woman, and very pretty she looked with a kerchief on her head and ample skirts. On her back was a bundle, and hidden inside her clothing were her jewels. She had no documents of any kind on her since, although her husband had spent a large sum of money in obtaining false identity papers, he had not given them – or any money – to her because everyone knew you should never entrust anything important to a woman as it was sure to be mislaid as soon as it was most needed!

What was she to do? Her husband had ordered her not to leave the station. ‘Don’t go straying off somewhere!’ he had said; and so she just had to stay … and wait.

She waited all day.

Then, seeing that her husband still had not turned up, she went over to talk with the frontier guards on the bridge. She sat down on a bench with them and started to chat and joke with them. Then she began to tell them of her awful predicament: her aunt had gone back into the town and didn’t seem to be coming back, but she couldn’t get across the frontier without her. What was she to do? She had to return to Austria where she had work, and her employer would be sure to beat her if she was late and didn’t show up on time. And so she prattled on with her tale of woe while, I am sure, smiling sweetly at those indomitable
military men until they melted and not only let her cross the border but went so far as to escort her as far as the Austrian guard post so as to ensure she came to no harm!

A week passed before the husband managed to reach Vienna; and I am sure he was not allowed to forget his tardiness for many a day, and no doubt found himself well and truly punished in more ways than one!

With the money they had ‘acquired’ in the Bankgasse raid, the refugees were able to put in hand some of the plans they had been making. One of these was to recruit bands of patriotic troops to go to the Vas and Zala districts next to the Austrian province of Styria and take control of these normally quiet border counties
50
.

At this time there were plenty of available officers among the exiles, but very few ordinary soldiers. It was therefore decided to recruit men from those elements of the unemployed Viennese who were honest, determined and well meaning. Small
advertisements
were put in a number of daily papers offering good pay to strong and courageous young men. Those interested were requested to report to certain ‘X, Y and Z’ offices between
specified
hours in the morning and late afternoon. I only know the story of one of these recruiting posts because I had it direct from a friend who was the treasurer there. However, I believe it was much the same in the others.

This particular post was opened at a restaurant in Landstrasse called the
Rother Hahn
– the Red Rooster. The recruiting
committee
consisted of five officers. On arrival there in the morning they were surprised to see many eager young men waiting for them on the pavement outside; and, as the day went by, their numbers continually increased. Inside the recruiting went slowly because each candidate had to be carefully checked to be sure of his nationality, his political views and his personal
history
. Also it had to be just as carefully explained to him what he was being hired to do. The restaurant’s main room was full to overflowing, while outside many hundreds were waiting to be let
in, so much so that traffic in Landstrasse was brought to a
standstill
. Of course this was not really surprising since there were then so many unemployed in Vienna.