Part of Kroner, and he dared not acknowledge this even to himself, was thankful to Sep for keeping his daughter from embarking on such an adventure, to say nothing of the money. But the departure of her savior before that salvation was even brought up was a big disappointment for Vera. Only now did she see how mistaken she was not to have applied to her soldier uncle herself, to have let her father intercede for her when she knew how inadequate he was.
She would act on her own. As soon as she made this decision, she was amazed that she had not been led to it earlier by the personality of her newly designated helper. He had been there all along, constantly before her eyes, and yet she had not seen him. He caught her attention first simply as a man, then as the man who could deliver her from her terrible worries and difficult decisions. As she was mulling these over in her mind, she saw him walking across the courtyard, tall and powerful, full-blooded, with long, smooth brown hair and light, close-set sharp eyes that looked into hers with undisguised admiration. At lunch she heard plenty about him, for by now Kroner associated all the advantages and disadvantages of his business life with that same Miklós Armanyi, the official in charge of his business.
At first Kroner had feared that the foreigner might become his tormentor, for during the requisition of the store the man was cold and stern; he examined all the documents and looked into all the corners, and announced that from then on without his authorization nothing could be initiated, nothing changed. But it soon turned out that this strictness was an expression of inexperience, of fear of being drawn onto thin ice by deception. As soon as it became clear to him that Kroner’s only desire was for himself and his family to survive, Count Armanyi abandoned these precautionary measures. He remained distant, but had no hesitation in telling, about himself, what he felt was essential to establish basic human contact. Soon, at the Kroner dinner table, it became known that Count Armanyi was unmarried and a barrister’s clerk whom mobilization had thrust into this delicate position. A position he had no reason to complain of, since it brought with it a wage three times what he had previously earned, and a fine apartment in one of the commandeered buildings that had belonged to local civil servants, and the reputation of a government official entrusted with special responsibilities. But he did not seem to be able to make full use of this reputation in Novi Sad, where he felt half-exiled; among its mixed population, he did not know whether to be more suspicious of the noisy and wild Serbs or of his own Hungarians, who had fattened themselves on their neighbors’ property and now wallowed in the euphoria of their oriental slovenliness and indifference.
He himself was from Pest, a civil servant’s son who had been indoctrinated with the idea that the work and rank of a civil servant should be valued above all else. But here that conviction had been eroded, weakened under the dull pressure of the inefficiency, disorder, and uncertainties of wartime. In high school, Armanyi had learned that the whole nation wept when southern regions of Hungary were annexed by Yugoslavia, but now some of his neighbors told him firmly and openly, for they were Hungarians and not afraid to talk, that under the Yugoslav regime things had been in some ways better, that people had behaved with greater warmth and humanity. Looking at the dusty streets, at the cluttered, small bazaarlike shops, at the movie houses, where people pushed and shoved to reach the unnumbered seats, at the open squares in front of the churches where beggars stood in clusters, grimacing to arouse pity, Armanyi found in the dispossessed owner of the business he now managed, in the thin, dejected, peace-seeking and book-loving Robert Kroner, a spirit of industriousness most resembling his own.
He began to question Kroner about the world of Novi Sad, which he did not understand, and from the answers gathered that Kroner himself understood very little of that world but submitted to it in resignation; this brought them closer together. Did Armanyi feel exiled? Exiled was what Kroner had been here for these twenty-odd years, since the day he allowed himself to be lured back from Vienna to take over his father’s store — temporarily, until a buyer was found, he thought, and until he could talk his mother into agreeing to the sale. But the few months he had expected became years; he was sidetracked by marriage and fatherhood. His way back to the centers of wisdom and civilization he had learned to respect in his youth was cut off: in fact, those centers were no longer there when he came to look for them. Would the same thing happen to Armanyi? Armanyi, too, had been transferred to the south for a short time, until the skirmish with the rebellious forces in the Balkans, which German and Hungarian cool-headedness would know how to subdue, was over. But then the war spread to the immeasurably vast fields of Russia, where battles were being waged whose outcome was by no means certain, while here, in the rear, the Bačka, which had been so easily captured, was a long way from submission. People seethed with expectation, and with scorn for the present situation.
That expectation was personified, for Armanyi, by Kroner’s children, Gerhard and Vera, whom he could observe all day long from the window in their father’s store. These grown-up children lived in idleness, and although he knew that this idleness had been imposed on them by the same state machine that had brought him here to watch them, he could not help but feel that it was part of their character. How could they walk around the courtyard with nothing to do, their hands behind their backs, their faces turned as early as the month of March toward the morning sun as it appeared over the store roof? How could they — with no apparent reason, such as reading a book or having a conversation — wander for hours in that confined space, which would have suffocated him had he not had his duties and his documents to occupy him?
At the end of May, deck chairs appeared on the grass that had come up between the house and the office, and the children sat in them and ate snacks. A few weeks later, Vera brought out a light, gray blanket, spread it on the grass, and, glistening with oil, in a two-piece bathing suit, lay in the sun. Every day, for hours, she lay patiently on the blanket, turning over, from back to front, from front to back, bending alternately her left, then her right knee, to be more comfortable and have every part of her body embraced by the sun. Now and then she would disappear into the house to shower, as one could tell from the droplets on her sunburned skin and the streaks on her bathing suit. Armanyi thought it sacrilege for her to bake her transparently white, smooth skin to a dirty pink and then a bright red. But once it took on a copper hue, it showed off still better the firm and gentle outlines of her young body, making it so alluring as to be almost unreal.
One afternoon, they met at the gate, and though she was fully dressed and wearing stockings and sandals, Armanyi could not resist telling her the impression she had made on him. “You really do not need to lie in the sun all the time.” He removed his hat in greeting and held it in his hand. “I was going to speak about this to your esteemed father, but I restrained myself, and I am glad now, because it gives me the opportunity to address myself directly to you.”
She expressed surprise. “You think the sun’s not good for me?”
“Well, perhaps not good in such large doses,” Armanyi replied, embarrassed at having failed to make himself understood. “But I really meant your appearance.”
“My appearance? You don’t like my appearance?”
Instead of making her blush, it was he who blushed. “On the contrary, your appearance. . I find your appearance lovely. You’re a beautiful girl, and watching you sunbathe every day is for me a privilege I never hoped for, especially here in a store, where in every other respect I am in despair, doing a job for which I am not equipped and for which I have not the slightest inclination. But still, it is a shame, because your white skin compliments your hair so exquisitely.”