The County of Birches Read online

  And now Sári too joined the fracas. “Stupid. Don’t be so stupid. It’s just a spanking!”

  She strained her eyes up into the shaking branches where, instead of finding Cimi, she was struck by the rays of the sun. White and blinding they pierced through the leaves, obliterating her sister. When she glanced down again at the gathering of her kin they were sprayed by sun spots that left brilliant holes in their chests, bellies and eyes. She was stunned by the blasted peace of the noontime idyll. The green and gold canopy that had sheltered two little girls and a baby kitten, the dangling of skinned knees and sagging socks and sandals the colour of milk chocolate shattered like a picture in glass.

  Alone in the tree, Sári felt stripped suddenly of all that rooted her. A weightlessness filled her head. The earth moved ever so slightly as though she might lift off and spin like a balloon on a current of air. She could pass out of this world now, lift, and let go.

  “Sar-i-ka!” Rózsa’s scream pierced Sári’s reverie, making her grab involuntarily at the tree trunk. “You’ll be sorry, Miss,” shouted the cook, “if I have to come up there to get you!”

  How had she gotten into this, Sári wondered, dazed by the fear of those below and the dangerous flight overhead of her sister. She was a good girl. She hadn’t gone looking for trouble. Her head felt light and her eyesight spotty. What she had witnessed seared through her like a brand. What was it? Something so troubling it made her float free of her body as though she were lighter than air. She didn’t like the sensation. It was too dangerous and too eerie and she had no patience for what she couldn’t understand.

  “Do you hear me, Miss? I can climb if I have to!”

  Sári didn’t recognize herself in what she had experienced. It made her chilly to think she had almost lost her grounding.

  “Nitwits,” Laci laughed up at them, “are you going to climb up to the sun?”

  Well, Cimi might think she could escape forever, but Sári wanted none of it. Slowly and carefully, she placed one foot below the other. She descended with relief, regretting only the decline of her role in the drama.

  Too stiff with panic to cast about for a switch or loosen his belt, Apuka beat her with his bare hand. Face smeared with tears and snot, head upside down because she was bent over, Sári barely made out the grey blur that streaked into the grass a moment before Apuka pushed her away so he could spring after her sister. Feckless, sly Cimi had waited until Apuka was absorbed in the beating, then scrambled down the tree trunk and sprinted off.

  “Cimi, get back here!”

  But Cimi ran and ran, her legs toughened by climbing trees and dodging the boys from the Christian Fathers’ lycée, who tried to pull her braids and worse if they could catch her. Apuka staggered home puffing, his shirt soaked with sweat, hand on his heaving chest. Mamuka waited in the sitting room. Deploring the spectacle her daughters had made of themselves, she sat stitching, her mouth an eloquent line.

  * * *

  Sári barely noticed the shadows lengthen along the nursery floorboards. All afternoon she lay on the bed, face stuffed into her pillow. Her parents’ voices, low and conciliatory, wafted from the main room where Mamuka had spread her sewing on the divan that pulled out nightly for the older girls’ bed. Tonight there would be no guests invited to sip cordials and enjoy the big girls’ renditions of operetta numbers. The young ones, lying two by two in the nursery, wouldn’t keep each other awake with scary stories about the one-legged beggar who prowled the streets of the Jewish quarter. There would be no pauses to listen to laughter ripple from the adjacent room when their sisters finished a popular song, and no succumbing to giggles that made the Austrian Fraulein get up time and again muttering her guttural hushes. The household was still in the aftermath of its midday crisis. It was quiet with implied recriminations and apologies.

  Sári heard the subdued sounds of the household from a spiritual remove. They had abandoned her and left her to her misery. Nobody cared. When Apuka came back sweating and panting, he had tried to take her in his arms.

  “It’s all over now, Sárika darling. You’re home and safe.”

  But she had shaken free. Over for him, perhaps, now that he didn’t need to worry. But what about her? No one seemed to care about what she felt.

  “Really, Sanyi.” Mamuka’s grey eyes had widened when she saw how dishevelled Apuka looked. Sufficiently quelled, he went straight to the pump and scooped water over his neck. Sári, sticky and sopping, waited in the door for attention. She had been frightened too, and then beaten and humiliated. But Mamuka only swiped at Sári’s face distractedly with her lace handkerchief and sat her down at the table with a glass of water. Sári stared into the glass, tears welling. It wasn’t fair. She had been dutiful. She’d only gone up into the tree to fetch Cimi down. She hadn’t run away and given Apuka a pain in his side. No one felt the slightest bit sorry for the wrong Sári had suffered. Her tears fell into the glass, and turned to sobs.

  “Sárika,” Mamuka sighed. “You know you gave your father such a fright.”

  Fright! Her fright had been worse. She’d been subjected to Cimi’s acrobatics in the air. She had swayed in the tree and nearly lost her balance. What if Apuka had seen that! His fright was nothing compared to hers, but no one took her feelings into account. Sári put her hand on her heart and sobbed even harder.

  “What’s this,” Laci teased, “is someone still beating you?”

  Such an insult, to have her suffering made light of.

  In the end there was nothing for it but to let Rózsa lift Sári in her big arms and carry her, legs trailing limply, to bed in the nursery.

  She conjured sorrowful scenarios that stoked her tears. How sorry they all would be when she died of her broken heart, her brief, tender life sacrificed by an unfeeling family. Then they would be exposed for their heartlessness. Cimi would be banished for the trouble she had made. She would get her reward finally for all the wrongs she had inflicted on her blameless sister. They would cast Cimi out of the family fold. When no one was looking, after the funeral cortege had finished its bitter business of burying Sári’s young, beautiful body, Cimi would crawl out from among the cemetery willows like a cast-out cur, and throw herself weeping on Sári’s grave.

  The sad and gratifying image sustained Sári through the long afternoon.

  * * *

  Too restless to coop himself up at the shop after an unnaturally quiet midday meal, Apuka drifted out onto the back lawn. He gazed quizzically at the huge elm. It had been here long before he had brought his bride to the house not even a decade into the century, more than twenty years ago. The house had appealed to him because of its proximity to the road that led from Beregszász’s Jewish quarter to the vineyards and groves of the surrounding countryside. In the days of his father, the land had been Russian. Sometimes Russian, sometimes Magyar or Austro-Hungarian. In any case they had remained Jews, whoever was master. Like the tree, they were rooted here and fixed in place.

  Tentatively Apuka touched the bark. It was just a tree, beautiful, shapely, a green fact he normally took satisfaction from when he left the house at dawn through the kitchen entrance. He’d glance at the tree dominating his yard, and think yes, it was anchored here. Whatever ill wind might blow through, it would hold firm.

  Today the hand of fate had brushed, wrongways, up the hair on his nape. A buyer had come out to the field that morning. As a rule, Apuka preferred to conduct business in the more formal setting of his shop, but occasionally a prospective client wished to make an inspection before placing his order. Those who dealt with Apuka year after year—the local Jewish merchants and distillers—trusted the quality of his fruit, but sometimes buyers came from farther afield when the crop had failed in a neighbouring county. It was natural for them to wish to look over the vineyard.

  Apuka watched, at ease in the doorway of his rough office, really a shack, as the stranger alighted from his sputtering motor car. The weather had obliged Apuka this season. His yield was nothing to be a
shamed of. The fieldhands looked up too at the sound of the motor. Hereabouts farmers and businessmen alike got around mainly on foot or by horse and buggy. The buyer was a stocky fellow who wore the waist-cinched suit with breeches of a country gentleman, not the flowing coat of a town Jew.

  “Herr Friedlander,” he extended his thick hand briskly towards Apuka. Odd that the stranger used the German rather than Hungarian Úr. Perhaps he had Austrian connections, thought Apuka.

  “You, Herr, have something I believe I require,” the customer pronounced ostentatiously.

  Although he was put off somewhat by the fellow’s manner, Apuka wouldn’t let it stand in the way of making a sale. He drew the stranger out towards the upper field that was yet to be harvested. The man’s Hungarian wasn’t tinged with an accent, Apuka noted after asking him where he had driven from that day. The German usage was obviously a pretension. Well, it wasn’t too much to ask of himself to overlook an irritating mannerism in the interest of making a profitable deal. Apuka pointed out the dense clusters of grapes on the sun-thinned vines, inviting the client to taste each variety.

  “But Herr Friedlander,” the buyer interrupted with what struck Apuka as an inappropriate laugh, “I have come to make a sale myself. In effect, to sell my own person.”

  “Sir?” Apuka pulled back coolly despite his reminder to himself to give the customer the benefit of the doubt.

  “I have a modest but prospering homestead near Munkács. In fact, we are mutually connected through your cousin Frau Blanka Gyorgy, whom your charming daughter Antonia visited this spring. There we enjoyed a brief, but I am flattered to believe, profound understanding.” At this he stopped and looked at Apuka so pointedly the hairs rose on the back of Apuka’s neck. “In short, I’m convinced we would make a successful match.”

  This odious man was claiming a personal relationship to him and his daughter. Apuka’s head felt wet beneath his hatband. Who did this stranger think he was to come out here in his motor car and field boots, flaunting German affectations and claims to Toni’s affections. What kind of a Jew would ask for a hand in marriage without, at least, a formal introduction? Indeed, what species of Jew was he? Apuka imagined himself to be a forward-thinking businessman, but certain proprieties were unassailable. No wonder this man rubbed him the wrong way with his beardless brazen face and clipped head naked beneath the blue eye of God’s ether.

  “Sir,” Apuka barely contained his agitation. He tipped back his hat as if to accommodate the blood that rushed to his head. “I don’t know you, your family, nor even which rebbe you follow.”

  “Rebbe?” The word plopped from the stranger’s mouth, like a pebble ingested by mistake. “Jew? Herr Friedlandler,” the suitor bridled in turn, “you take me for a Jew!”

  Apuka felt lightheaded. How could he have been so blind not to realize the stranger wasn’t Jewish? He was a goy, not here to buy fruit from a Jewish grower, but to take something far more valuable. A goy, shaved and hatless, and—in all likelihood—with foreskin intact. Asking for his daughter. Had the natural order of things suddenly become skewed?

  “How dare you,” choked Apuka, and managed again only, “how could you dare presume…?”

  “Me?” demanded the goy with insufferable arrogance. “You should be grateful for the chance of marrying her out of this mire!”

  Apuka sent the stranger packing so fast he didn’t even learn his name. Although epithets were exchanged, he congratulated himself on maintaining the presence of mind to keep his hands off the fellow.

  It unnerved him, that he was so much in the dark he didn’t know what his children were up to. Had Toni been hiding, all these months, a secret correspondence? How could he be expected to protect them and help them make the right choices for their lives if they kept from him the most important details?

  When Apuka had first brought his bride to the white-washed, single-storey structure that would be their home, the elm seemed to welcome them with its outstretched beckoning boughs. Inwardly, he saluted it like the sturdy sentinel it brought to mind. At that time the house consisted of two commodious chambers, the kitchen and the main room that served for everything else. They had entered through the main room’s portal at the front of the house and surveyed its generous proportions. These days the door was permanently blocked by the walnut chiffonier that held drawers of table linens. And the two rooms had grown to four. The family had burgeoned, requiring first a nursery addition, then spilling into the main room and raising the need for a chamber for the parents. The rooms opened one into the other. Nights, after the lights were extinguished in the main room, Mamuka and Apuka passed through the nursery that breathed with the syncopated rhythms of their babies, to their own room that was small but luxurious in its privacy. The newel-posted bed was weighted by silk eiderdowns and goose-feathered pillows in monogrammed slipcovers. Now Apuka marvelled at how quickly their children had sprung into the world. The bed had spawned five girls and two boys in hardly a dozen years. Each child had added exponentially to his cares.

  Apuka had heard Sári yelling before he turned into the yard. Liliana was always chiding the children not to shout like peasants, but you couldn’t monitor them each moment. He looked across the lawn to see what the little girls were doing. That’s when he spotted them hanging out on the edge of the limb as thoughtlessly as birds.

  Apuka looked up into the tree again. It had failed him, or at least misled him. Its permanence didn’t seem at all reassuring. There was treachery in its massive, unwieldy bulk. The thing was trapped by its roots, ingrown as much as it was growing. And it could snatch from him what was most precious with its high ensnaring fingers.

  Shadows collected on the lawn, but Apuka still felt the heat of the summer sun in the warm bark. It passed into his palm. They were rooted here, he and the elm. But what about his children? When he pictured them up in the high branches of the tree, he panicked. He saw them, light-boned and delicate, singing their modern songs guilelessly. What if an ill wind were to blow through? A wind dark and fierce with malice, that blew them away to the ends of the earth? He felt unsure of himself and sensitive to his shortcomings, especially following Liliana’s disapproval of his outburst. Perhaps she would think he had been reckless too chasing that anti-Semite off their land.

  * * *

  Cimi lounged along a thick bough overhead, looking down at her father. He seemed too subdued. The odd way he touched the tree made her uncomfortable. Apuka wasn’t given to moody reflection. He was active and opinionated and as likely to burst into song as one of his children. What was he doing communing with a tree trunk? She wanted to distract him. Poor Apuka, to be so troubled over a big old tree that was as solid and safe as the ground.

  She was up again in the offending tree, so she hesitated from calling down right away, even though Apuka looked in need of comfort. She was more accustomed to his flash rages. All she had to do was lead him on a chase; eventually he tired of his anger. Today she had circled back to the yard after shaking Apuka off her scent, then taken refuge for the afternoon in the very place no one would expect her to have the audacity to hide. For the first time Cimi regretted provoking her father. She must have upset him a great deal, she thought, to cause him to hang about like this. Poor Apuka to be so needlessly worked up. She and her siblings were as sure-footed as mountain goats. The tree was like a second home. She had lain on the branch all afternoon, idly breaking off twigs and leaves, and working them in her fingers until she found she could twine them together. As she fashioned the sticks and flakes of bark into something that had shape, she forgot all about the time despite the gnawing in her stomach. When Apuka came outside, she was just beginning to notice that the sun’s rays had faded.

  “Apuka,” she risked calling as he turned away. “Apuka, wait!”

  The sound of Cimi’s voice pulled Apuka’s heartstrings. Fool, he was as sentimental as he was hot-tempered. Soon he would get teary-eyed like his daughters over a popular ballad. Cimi scrambled down the trunk and
he felt a rush of gratitude as though the tree had relented and returned, unharmed, his youngest, wildest bird. Let this be a lesson then to stop brooding and count his blessings.

  “There you are, you naughty child. You better come in and have a word with your sister.”

  Cimi was sorry about Sári’s spanking, but it was Sári’s own fault that she hadn’t tried to get away. She was always telling Cimi what to do as though she knew everything, but look what it had gotten her. Cimi knew Sári would blame her, and Sári could be unforgiving. Cimi nestled contentedly in Apuka’s arms. Well, it wouldn’t hurt to beg Sári’s pardon. Cimi, after all, had escaped.

  “What have you got there?” asked Apuka, noticing the circlet in her hand.

  “See,” she said playfully, “I’ve made you a crown.”

  He laughed proudly, observing the clever way she had worked the rough, hard wood of the elm. His children weren’t just beautiful. They were clever and talented, blessed with the gifts of the Lord.

  “That will never get around my thick skull.” Apuka patted Cimi dotingly, forgetting for once to deceive the evil eye by pretending to spit on her creation. “You’ll just have to wear it yourself.”

  * * *

  Sári stirred from her pool of misery when she heard them come in. The creak of the kitchen door plucked her attention. It was about time Cimi made an appearance and got what she deserved.

  “So,” pronounced Rózsa weightily, “the prodigal comes back.”

  An uncertain silence hung in the air for a moment.

  “On Apuka’s shoulders? More like the conquering hero.” Laci’s saucy rejoinder broke the tension. Led by Mamuka’s barely suppressed chortle, the family burst out laughing.

  To Sári, sequestered with her burden of mistreatment, their good humour felt like a slap. How could they laugh? A joke was all it took for them to overlook Cimi’s offence?