“I wouldn’t be so sure,” he smiled. “Anyway, that’s probably not so bad.”
The corrugated aluminum roofs of the hangars flashed between the trees. The blue and white windsock rode the shifting streams of air.
Chapter X
Istvan glanced at his watch again. The hands seemed to be dead, though the second hand twitched as it moved around the face. It was seven minutes past three. The work day ended at four, but their “contacts” were only received until three, so the business day was, for all practical purposes, over. But it was not good form to make one’s exit before the ambassador without a definite reason. The boss did not like it.
“As long as I am here, everyone must be at their posts. That is my wish, comrades, and you must abide by it,” he had said in a briefing.
He kept them all in this state of readiness a little out of spite. He preferred his office in the embassy to the tedium of his house. The dinner there was not entirely to his liking, for his wife struggled to have Hungarian dishes served, but the cook could not learn to prepare them. Judit had had to listen to the ambassador’s complaints more than once, and repeated them to Istvan with concealed enjoyment.
The ambassador’s wife, a stout woman, had been accustomed to drudgery from childhood; lately she had put on weight, and, clad in brocade gowns that were too tight, grated on others’ nerves at receptions with her puffy face and her everlasting frown of dissatisfaction, especially when she stood beside supple Hindu women, beauties draped in saris. If one of them were equally heavyset, she looked majestic, never merely commonplace. Diplomats’ wives from the Anglo-Saxon circle called her “the huckster” because of the shrill voice in which she doggedly complimented the refreshments and extolled her husband’s merits. Istvan himself had heard this and was rather ashamed that he had not said a word in her defense.
The servants pretended that they did not understand her broken English and played malicious little tricks on her. They knew she would make no accusations, because her husband and sons would laugh at her. Displaced from her ordinary activities, she wandered around the house with her forehead covered with lemon plasters and her eyes swollen from weeping when no one could see. She suffered from chronic headaches. “With those plasters she looks like a sadhu of some arcane rite,” Kalman Bajcsy would quip. “India is bad for her — the heat, the food, even the smell of the phlox that she ordered to have mowed down in front of the house. Her head always hurts so that when we arrived in Budapest, she had to have a maid. She only recovered her spirits during the days when she had thrown one out and not yet engaged another. She is sick without women’s work. She grumbles about India; she tries to induce me to go home. I explain that our country pays us very well for her aching head, so she should not complain. She has no faith in doctors. She looks to the local healers for help. Her faith in the wisdom of the occult is equal to her stupidity.” He burst out laughing in his hearty bass. “Once again I had to throw out one of those strapping, good-looking masseurs whose specialty is glands. I know those quacks and I know who found him for her.”
The ambassador did not hurry to the residence, as they called the small palace leased from a rajah who had been guilty of some malfeasance involving commodities supplied to the government, and banished from the capital. It was difficult to be certain what Bajcsy did in the afternoons. Ferenc alluded vaguely to scholarly work in the area of economics, as indicated by the underlinings in newspapers — stacks of which were cleared away once a week by the caretaker — and English dictionaries piled on his desk. Judit surmised that it was crossword puzzles. Just prior to his departure the ambassador would be exceptionally active, would give orders, call people in for talks, instruct the staff to act on matters that might have taken another week in the files to be ripe for completion. It seemed that he wanted to keep them working all night, until morning, until the very hour that he reappeared.
He thought — not inaccurately, as a matter of fact — that the moment he crossed the threshold of the embassy and made his way home, the entire operation went slack or, properly speaking, ceased to exist. When he had to go away from Delhi, he hedged their authority and decision-making powers around with so many reservations and conditions that, in effect, all matters waited for his return. Listening to reports, he gloated, “You see! Without the boss, work comes to a halt. I know you complain about me behind my back, but you yourselves know that things do not go well without me. It is better if I take the leadership on my shoulders and on my conscience. Give me those papers.”
Istvan had not seen Margit for a week; she had been called away. Before that they had seen each other often, even if only for a few hours. By now he had grown used to her flying in at two and flying out again to Agra at seven. A week of silence, of unannounced interruption to their meetings, brought back his old uneasiness. So he was electrified when her voice came on the telephone, and even more when she informed him that if she flew into the city with the professor, she should be free to see him around three-thirty. He wanted to drive out to the airport; she preferred that he not do that, and they agreed to meet at Volga.
He had to wait a quarter of an hour. When she was in New Delhi, even if she could not meet him on time, she would let him know where to pick her up. He glanced out the window at the open gates of the garage, but the ambassador’s wide Mercedes stood motionless inside them; its signal lights shone red in the sun.
He sat where he was. What was the man waiting for? he sighed. If he doesn’t come out in five minutes, I don’t care what happens, I’ll be on my way to the city.
Though he could have found ten reasons to go out, it would have been proper to inform the front office and call the ambassador in case he had any urgent assignments. Istvan wanted to avoid that. He knew all too well that he would be summoned and made to listen to a handful of precepts interspersed with reminiscences about the party; he had heard variants of some of those edifying object lessons already. Once they had been about the experiences of loyal comrades with whom the ambassador had been in prison for Horthy. Another time Bajcsy had trotted out anecdotes that demonstrated his own courage or cleverness. He was relieved when he looked through the window and saw the squatty figure of the ambassador. The cryptographer’s son, little Mihaly, toddled beside him. He was telling the ambassador something and waving his hands earnestly. Their shadows fell on the white garage wall that gleamed from under festoons of wisteria.
Suddenly the ambassador stood still, as if the boy’s words had finally penetrated his mind. He turned toward him and asked something. Istvan looked at the little fellow’s uplifted hand as it made circles in the air. He is selling me out — the thought darted through his mind — he will boast about the visits to Krishan. Mihaly was talking; in the end he extended his hands and clapped them together with all his might. He has blurted out everything, the silly little Judas. He has no idea what he is doing. Istvan forgave the child at once. Intuitively he was almost certain that something had happened, and that its sinister effects were unforeseeable. He sat still, stricken with fear and a sense of utter helplessness: nothing could be stopped, salvaged, retracted. It had happened. But what? He heard no words; he could only decipher what was being told from gestures.
Kalman Bajcsy raised his head and looked into the embassy window. Even through the screen he must see me; Terey’s lips tightened. I will not hide. Through the thick wire mesh coated with dust he saw the ambassador’s forehead shining with sweat, saw his bushy eyebrows and his eyes squinting from the painful glare of the sun. For a moment they looked each other up and down. Then Bajcsy waved a hand to summon him.