They Were Counted (The Writing on the Wall: the Transylvanian Trilogy) 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, Harpe’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

  Count Miklós Bánffy (1873–1950)

  THE WRITING ON THE WALL

  (Erdélyi Tőrténet)

  The Transylvanian Trilogy

  by

  MIKLÓS BÁNFFY

  BOOK ONE

  They Were Counted

  Translated by

  PATRICK THURSFIELD and KATALIN BÁNFFY-JELEN

  Foreword by

  PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  FOREWORD by PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

  INTRODUCTION: Miklós Bánffy and the Transylvanian Trilogy

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  PART TWO

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  PART THREE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  PART FOUR

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  PART FIVE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  PART SIX

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  About the Author

  Copyright

  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

  In loving memory of

  Patrick Thursfield, 1923–2003

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

  PATRICK THURSFIELD and KATALIN BÁNFFY-JELEN are the translators of the Bánffy Trilogy (They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided, winner of the Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2002) and The Phoenix Land, also by Miklós Bánffy.

  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 so
rt 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 was 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 Uniat – and, with the phantoms of their lost ascendency still about them, the prevailing atmosphere conjured up the tumbling demesnes of the Anglo-Irish 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 emerges 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.

  INTRODUCTION

  Miklós Bánffy and the Transylvanian Trilogy

  by

  PATRICK THURSFIELD

  MY ACQUAINTANCE with the works of Miklós Bánffy started one day some years ago when I was motoring from my home in Tangier to Rabat. My fellow passenger was a Hungarian friend, Kathy Jelen, who had lived for many years in Tangier and who was going to Rabat to sign some papers that confirmed her ownership of the copyright to her father’s works. All I had known about Kathy’s father, Count Miklós Bánffy, was that he had been a wealthy Hungarian magnate and politician; but I had not known before that he had for many years been a Member of Parliament; nor that he had been Foreign Minister in 1921/2; nor anything about his writings or of his directorship of the State theatres in Budapest; nor of his practical support for writers and artists, and indeed all ethnic Hungarians, in the new Romanian Transylvania of the 1920s and ’30s; nor anything of his role as a great landowner with a castle near Kolozsvár (once also called Klausenburg and now given the Romanian name of Cluj-Napoca) whose fortune derived from thousands of acres of forest in the mountains of Transylvania. During our leisurely four hour’s car ride we talked of little else and when Kathy told me of his great trilogy, Erdélyi Tőrténet – in English A Transylvanian Tale – which had been a bestseller in Hungary in the 1930s but which had never been translated or published elsewhere as the last volume had not appeared until 1940 when all Europe was in the throes of war, I longed to know more. First of all she told me about the first book of the trilogy, Megszámláltattál – They Were Counted, which had just been re-issued on its own in Budapest and had been an immediate sell-out; and it had been because of this that Miklós Bánffy’s daughter had thought it wise to confirm her ownership of the copyright and so henceforth be entitled to receive some benefit, however modest, from her father’s works which was all that remained of her lost inheritance. At that time, of course, no cracks were yet to be seen in the Communist stranglehold over eastern Europe, so there was still no suggestion that dispossessed exiles would ever regain any of their lost possessions.

  Kathy then revealed that several years before she had begun an English translation, but that it had not prospered and she had never finished it. I picked up the scent at once and was soon in full pursuit. Could I read what she had written? Of course. As soon as we returned to Tangier she would bring it round to me. A few days later there arrived a tattered brown parcel containing a huge pile of faded typescript in single spacing on flimsy paper. The different chapters were held together with rusty paperclips and the appearance of it all was, to say the least, uninviting. Several pages seemed to have been mauled by cats, as I later found to have been the case. By then Kathy had told me more about her father, a polymath if ever there was one, kind, gentle, a linguist, an artist whose designs were still in use at the Budapest opera, a humanist and a great lover of his country and of women (including, it is said, Elinor Glyn who was thought to have used him as the model for one of her heroes) many of whom had fallen into his arms before he married late in life the actress who had been his great love but whom, because of the shibboleths of that class-ridden world, he had not been able to marry until after his father’s death. She also told me of the great baroque castle of Bonczhida, the Bánffy home in Transylvania, which figures in the novel under the name of Dénestornya, much as some years later Lampedusa’s Donnafugata was to be a pen portrait of that author’s family palace at Santa Margherita Belice in Sicily. Both houses are now ruins, the first through the spoliations of war and official neglect (the mansions of the former Hungarian ruling class were not hel
d in esteem in Communist Romania) and the second destroyed by an earthquake.

  I think I had been told that before she became Countess Bánffy, Kathy’s mother had been an accomplished and popular actress at the State Theatre in Budapest, but I knew nothing of the story of the aristocrat’s love for the actress nor of the many hurdles to be surmounted before their marriage could take place.

  Dismayed though I was by the state of the manuscript I tackled it at once and was enthralled. When I started to read what Kathy had already translated, the original text and a Hungarian dictionary at my side, I soon discovered that written Hungarian is often a staccato language even when it is at its most elegiac. In consequence a literal translation in English would give none of the quality of the original and would fail completely to give any idea of the idiom and feeling of the first years of this century in central Europe. Besides this the length of the work and its Dickensian range of plot and subplot, as well as the extensive cast-list, meant that anyone tackling it would have to make an English version rather than a literal translation. What a challenge!

  I at once asked Kathy if she would let me see what I could do and then, if she agreed and it seemed to go well, I would show what I had done to friends in London and ask their opinion before we embarked on a voyage which would involve much time and effort for us both. Encouraged, we set to work; and now the pages of Kathy’s literal translation (on which I could base an English text) arrived in exemplary legible typescript. Of course I must have been a little crazy to tackle anything of that length – particularly a translation of a dead author who, however well-known he may have been in his own country, had never been heard of in the English-speaking world. And not only that, but to tackle, even with the help of a born Hungarian, a book originally written in a language of which I did not then understand a single word (and I confess to not knowing many more now), was sheer folly. But I was caught by the sweep of the story, the range of characters, the heartbreak, the truth and the sheer humanity of it all. I knew that once started I could never stop until it was done for I desperately wanted others to enjoy it as much as I had. Furthermore I did have one unexpected advantage. As a boy I had often spent holidays with Anglo-Austrian cousins in their castle in Tyrol and so I did have some first-hand experience of central-European vie de château which in the 1930s had barely changed since the days, thirty years before, that Bánffy had described in the trilogy. A year later the first long draft of our version of They Were Counted was completed. The others followed, and six years later it was all done.