Parliament was recalled and 13 December was announced as the date of the next session. On the preceding day a small paragraph appeared in the official gazette:
The Parliamentary Guards have been instructed that in no circumstances, even if bodily assaulted, are they to restrain Members by force.
Needless to say this decree had not been inspired by respect for the members, but rather was the Government’s reply to the rumours of violence that had been put about by the opposition, and which had done so much to alarm the public.
On 13 December Balint had arrived somewhat late and, seeing the quantity of hats and coats in the cloakroom, realized that most of the other members had got there before him. It only occurred to him later how worried all the doorkeepers and porters had seemed.
No one was to be seen in the corridors leading to the Chamber. All was silence; he could not even hear his own footsteps on the heavily carpeted floor. And any noise from inside was effectively cut off by the heavy curtains that draped all the entrances.
Balint stepped inside totally unprepared for what he would find there.
Only about thirty members were present, all ‘Zoltans’ — the nickname for those on the extreme left. They were standing on the Speaker’s platform, throwing down chairs, ripping out the balustrades, throwing the recording secretaries’ equipment about and, in the middle of the floor of the House, where the Table of the Law had already been overturned, they were making piles of the desks and chairs of the ministerial benches.
At one side, surrounded by six or seven of his colleagues, stood Samuel Barra, their leader. When they saw Abady enter the room they swarmed round him, happy to boast of their antics to a newcomer.
All shouting at once they bragged about their behaviour and their misdeeds, roaring and stamping. Balint listened in growing horror and disgust as they shouted:
‘We beat the hell out of them.’
‘Did you see how I hit him with an inkpot?’
‘The coward bent double … did you see?’
‘We’ve had a real battle here, my friend.’
‘But the guards couldn’t hit back. The Decree forbade it!’ shouted Balint when he had a chance to speak.
‘Be damned to that! They would have if we’d given them a chance, but we didn’t!’ cried Barra and he launched into one of his usual rabble-rousing speeches full of slogans like ‘Girded with the Nation’s Right’, ‘The Power of the People’, ‘Irresistible Force’, and ‘Spurred by the Sacred Flames of Hungary’s Freedom’ until finally halted by one of his henchmen who, interrupting this flow of self-praising oratory, came up and said: ‘Chief! Did you see how I beat them off the platform with this?’ He brandished a weapon made from a long piece of oak torn from the platform railings, from which nails protruded unevenly. ‘I harpooned the dogs!’
Still bragging, they hardly noticed one of their band who had been sitting at the side and who now moved down to the centre of the floor where they had made a pile of the chairs and desks. He was a tall, skinny, unshaven and swarthy man dressed in a dirty priest’s frock. He climbed to the top of the pile of broken furniture and sat down, smiling viciously, his hands on his hips in the stance of a stage conqueror.
‘Bravo, Jancsi! Bravo!’ they cried.
At this moment a side door opened. Tisza walked in. He stood quite still and just looked at them. There was a sudden silence as everyone present saw who was there. Tisza spoke quietly and coldly.
‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?’ With a gesture of utter contempt, he turned on his heel and left.
To Balint, lying sleepless in the train, the rumble and clatter beneath his carriage — Choo-choo-choo … Choo-choo-choo — recalled the mindless uproar in the Chamber and seemed to mock his own indecision.
How could he ally himself to a crowd who could beat up defenceless public servants? Yet if he remained aloof he would be helping the secret plans of the Belvedere Palais, where the Heir was only waiting to pounce and destroy Hungarian independence once and for all.
It was this dilemma that now chased Balint away from the capital. A sort of nausea overcame him as he lay there seeking, and yet fleeing from a decision. And all the time the monotonous, heartless Choo-choo-choo beneath him chased both sleep and a decision from him.
It was late when Balint finally slept and it was late, too, when he awoke the following morning to find the sun glinting through the window blinds. At first he thought that the attendant had forgotten to wake him and that he had passed Kolozsvar in his sleep, but he was soon reassured: his train was now several hours late.
He dressed quickly and went out into the corridor. The weather outside was superb. The snow glistened in the bright sunshine, and ice floated on the Koros river which ran beside the railway track. Everything was blindingly white; even the steep mushroom-like roofs of the peasants’ houses were thickly covered by snow. Here and there a dray-cart pulled by a buffalo could be seen on the road, its shivering owner walking alongside.
Both far and near the thick carpet of snow had the fine texture of powdered icing sugar. Without stopping the train sped through Banffy-Hunyad and started the steep climb to the Sztana Tunnel.
Balint moved back into his sleeping compartment to look out the other side of the train. He remembered that surely it was somewhere here that Adrienne’s home was to be found, a white house opposite an old ruin that could be seen as the train came out of the tunnel; and when, brakes screaming on the curve, the train did emerge from the darkness, the first thing Balint saw in the distance were the ruins of an old castle and in among a stand of now leafless beech trees, two vertical white shapes which were probably the corner towers of a country house. He wondered if Adrienne were there, perhaps even at this very moment gazing, as he was, at the castle ruins. And if she were, would the knowledge that Balint was doing the same upset her as much as had the touch of his hand the last time they had met? It was many weeks since he had allowed himself to think about Adrienne, for after the scene in the garden he had chased away all thought of her even when his memories had brought her involuntarily to his mind.
Balint’s mother, Roza Abady, was a short, chubby little woman who dressed always in black and whose snow-white hair and old-fashioned clothes made her seem years older than the mere fifty she really was. Since the early death of her husband, which had been a terrible blow to her after barely ten years of marriage, she had braced herself to accept the unwelcome role of a widow and had dressed as such ever since. Though their marriage had been planned by their families, the union of the handsome, talented and charming Tamas Abady with his rich little cousin Roza had been a love-match from the start. Even so, their early years together had been stormy and fraught with tension because their characters had been so different.
The young Roza, an only child whose arrival after her parents had been married for more than twelve years was hailed as some kind of miracle, had been wilful, capricious and spoilt. She tyrannized her parents’ house and she had been treated so much like a princess in a fairy tale that, in time, this is what she believed herself to be. The grandeur of her surroundings, the huge castle of Denestornya with its countless servants and seemingly limitless parklands, over which the only child was allowed to believe she had absolute power, all contributed to inflate Roza’s sense of her own importance, and made her arrogant and, at times, uncontrollable.