More Was Lost by Eleanor Perenyi

Author:Eleanor Perenyi [PERÉNYI, ELEANOR]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590179505
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2016-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

Cousin Laci’s House

On Cousin Laci’s Estate

13

LITTLE by little the outside world began to creep in to our daily lives. We couldn’t help reading the papers, and Zsiga began to spend more and more of his evenings crouched over the radio. We had a very good one, and we could get anything in Europe, including Moscow. Then one day, over this radio, we heard Schuschnigg say “God save Austria,” and we heard Hitler’s entrance into Linz, and as much of the victory speeches as we could stand.

We had spent our first Christmas in Vienna. We stayed at Sacher’s, where we had a red and gold room. But we had really gone to see the aunt who had been lady-in-waiting, and her children, who were Zsiga’s first cousins. They lived in the Augarten. This was a sort of park around a big palace that had belonged to the Emperor’s mother. It had several smaller palaces in it that were dependencies. Somehow the Salms had been allowed to go on living in one of these. They were wretchedly poor. They had very little left but some pieces of fine furniture, and the porcelain stoves that went with the little palais. They had archduchesses in to take tea with them, and they simply ignored the squalid little jobs that kept them alive. The only way you could tell they were so poor was the way they cleaned their plates at dinner. The plates were stamped with two gold salmon, the family crest, and they wiped them up in a way that in America would not be considered very polite. They had had many bitter things to say against the Germans, not because they loved democracy — they didn’t — but because they were violently Royalist. They had warned us about the impending Anschluss. They saw it as a problem for the exiled Hapsburgs. They would really have been very tiresome if one had had to live with them, and really come to grips with their ideas; but I hadn’t had to, and in a way I had come to have quite an affection for them. Now, with the “Sieg Heils” pouring in over the radio, we wondered what would happen to them. I was glad that I had had a last look at Vienna, which I adored. A snowy beautiful Vienna . . . A few days later the Viennese aunt called up Papa long-distance, heaven knows how, and spoke to her brother in Hungarian. She said, “The carcasses of the dead animals are here.” It seemed a very accurate picture to me, and I never saw Vienna again.

Zsiga’s “population,” as he always called them, were beginning to be very uneasy. There were rumors already that Czechoslovakia would be next. Among our friends, it was said that if this happened Hungary would ask for her lost provinces along with any demands that Hitler might make. These people were simply pro-Hungarian. The Jews, too, were pro-Hungarian. Among all the many stupid things the Hungarians did

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