The Battle on the Kitchen Table

The house stood several hundred metres above the valley, at the end of a gravel track that began where the village ended. In the grey morning mist, which hid even the mountains, it was little more than a speck in the distance.

Not entirely sure the track wouldn’t turn into a pasture at any moment, I parked the car on ground that was only half firm and continued on foot. The speck grew larger, acquired an outline and soon stood out, brown, against the green wall of fir trees behind it.

A stone foundation braced the house against the slope, and now I could see that it really was an Alpine chalet, built of dark timber, with little patches of red that must have been its shutters.

Something brushed against my leg, rather low down and too rough to be a cat. Besides, it could yap. Well, look at that, a wire-haired dachshund! No, two. They bounced around me on short legs, beside themselves with excitement, noisy but friendly.

By the time I reached the wooden door, it was open, and a bearded man stood in the doorway. His hair was already white, but he was nowhere near as old as I had feared. He wore a plain woollen cap, a corduroy jacket, beneath it a T-shirt without a slogan, and loose, no longer clean jeans over shoes he must have slipped into in a hurry, judging by the undone laces. What a relief! I wouldn’t be spending the next day or two with Heidi’s grandfather after all. Dénes might be any number of things, but a mountain farmer he wasn’t.

Nor did the strong accent with which he greeted me come from the mountains. It was Hungarian-accented German in an almost textbook form, drawn out and full of rounded vowels, just short of a parody. Still, we understood each other. Well, almost.

‘Straight on to the main course, or shall we start with the soup?’ Dénes asked after we had gone inside and he had planted a tin mug of coffee, without milk or sugar, in front of me.

‘Oh,’ I said gratefully, ‘I don’t mind, as long as there’s something to eat!’

‘I’m not talking about food. Do you want to start with that document with the coat of arms you wrote to me about, or shall we work our way through the letters first?’

He turned to the fridge, took out two plates and set them on the heavy wooden table in the middle of the room. One held cubes of cheese, the other a sausage that definitely hadn’t come from Switzerland. It seemed to be floating on a little red pool of glistening oil.

‘There’s a knife in the drawer under the table. Water’s in the jug, and the pálinka is on top of the fridge, should the need arise.’

Dénes gestured in the direction he had just come from.

‘Pálinka?’ I asked. ‘At this hour?’

‘Good for grease and grief. And there may be plenty of grief today, judging by what you’ve brought with you.’

I had filled a very old travelling case, with metal-reinforced corners and a handle still attached by metal hinges, with a selection of the letters that seemed most important to me, as far as I could judge. Among them I had found more death notices. I hoped they might help me place relatives I knew nothing about. I had even started building a family tree on the internet, although so far I had got no further than Grandma and Grandpa. Naturally, I said nothing about this to Dénes.

Without asking, he had already lifted the case onto the table and was scooping out the top layer of its contents with both hands.

One of the first envelopes contained a sheet of paper, folded several times, with a broad black border. Unfolded, it covered a good part of the table.

‘Better not get any grease on this,’ Dénes said. ‘It’s quite a valuable piece of paper!’

‘Why? Has the king died?’

‘Something like that,’ came the dry reply. ‘Your great-grandmother, if I’m reading this correctly. And half of Transylvania is on the list of mourners. See those lines nested inside one another at the bottom? The ones where the print gets smaller and smaller?’

‘Yes, I see them. What’s that supposed to mean? Had the typesetter been at the pálinka?’

Dénes ignored the joke.

‘It means that not only the children and grandchildren are listed, but more distant relatives as well, second cousins and even further removed. The more distant their blood relationship to the deceased, the smaller the name. With so many people on the notice, that made it easy to see who had been closest to her. Besides, it was the only way to fit them all on the page.’

‘Notice that her husband isn’t there?’ Dénes continued. ‘Your great-grandmother outlived him and died a widow. That’s why her married name appears again underneath. And directly below it are the children’s names. Four daughters, of course, the Mátéffy girls!’

Now I could see them too: Mária, Teréz, Irén and Olga. My grandmother and her three sisters. Gradually the countless other names also began to make sense and fall into place; I recognised a few, but most were strangers to me.

The more Dénes explained, the less I felt the need to hide my feelings behind little jokes. I had lost my appetite for sausage and cheese as well. I had set off at four that morning without breakfast. It was almost ten now. Gratefully, I held the coffee mug in both hands. How well its hot, bitter contents suited what we were doing: dipping curiously into the past and coming across the names of people, not one of whom was still alive.

Hours passed in this fashion, interrupted only by feeding the dachshunds and taking on fresh air ourselves outside the house. The sun had long since burned away the mist, and I stood in a picture postcard of Swiss mountain beauty, surrounded by a summer bursting with life, while behind me, in the kitchen, the dead were piling up in envelopes.

‘Shall we go for a walk?’ Dénes asked behind me.

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I think I’d like that. A long walk, quite a way east. But first, the “main course”.’

‘Then let’s dish it up!’

Dénes carefully spread the sheet out in front of him and studied it for a long time. Then he began to read, slowly, murmuring the words under his breath, and his voice changed, along with his whole manner of speaking. How long had it been since I had last heard Hungarian!

Every so often he paused to jot down a word, sometimes half a sentence. He wasn’t too proud to reach for a dictionary when an expression was too old-fashioned for the German equivalent to spring readily to mind. Before long he had a list that allowed him to read the whole thing to me in German.

‘We,’ he began, ‘Apafy Mihály, by the grace of God Prince of Transylvania, Lord of Parts of Hungary and High Count of the Székelys, hereby make known:’

I realised I had edged right up against my brand-new old uncle. He glanced at me, smiled, then went on.

‘Whereas certain loyal men have found favour with us and our principality through their services, their valour and their conduct, and whereas we are assured both of their past merits and of their future loyalty, we have resolved to extend to them our special grace.’

Dénes nudged me.

‘Could you stop jiggling your feet? Please.’

‘It’s the coffee,’ I lied.

‘Then go have a piss!’

‘Can’t. Not just now.’

‘Right, to continue. We therefore raise,’ Dénes went on, ‘István Mátéffy, together with his sons András, György and István, and all their lawful descendants, to the rank of nobility as of this day.’

Mátéffy. My grandmother’s maiden name. Only moments before, I had seen it on her mother’s death notice.

Apparently I had said that aloud, because Dénes laughed.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I knew your grandmother.’

‘But … “all their lawful descendants” … that would mean …’ I couldn’t finish the sentence. It was too … embarrassing?

‘Yes, it would!’ Dénes took the words out of my mouth.

‘If we were living before World War One, it really would mean there was a Hungarian nobleman sitting at my kitchen table. Two of them, actually.’

He gave a little bow and smiled.

‘Allow me to introduce myself: Sárosy Dénes, of the old Hungarian nobility, ennobled by Rákóczi György II, another Prince of Transylvania, only a little earlier, in the year of our Lord 1650, I believe. How unfortunate that I don’t have the letter to hand.’

‘Er … what?’

‘Forget it. Those days are gone. And although I personally think that’s a shame, it doesn’t change the fact that there is no nobility any more. Full stop.’

‘I do … er … realise that,’ I replied weakly. ‘But you understand this has come as a bit of a surprise to me, don’t you?’

‘Of course,’ Dénes said. ‘But perhaps we’d better finish reading it first. There might be a clause right at the end specifically excluding you!’

He winked.

This time it was my turn to ignore his joke.

The text went on to spell out the rights and obligations that came with ennoblement, and then described the coat of arms being granted. What I had taken for a morning star was referred to as a ‘battle mace’, a wonderfully evocative expression, Dénes and I agreed.

The final lines read:

‘Issued at our residence in Gyulafehérvár, in the year of our Lord 1662, on the twenty-first day of September.

Signed:

Apafy Mihály, Prince

Bethlen János, Chancellor.’

Dénes glanced sideways at me. I stared at the letter.

‘That’s all,’ he said, leaning back in his chair.

Then, when I still hadn’t spoken after a while:

‘I knew it. But I’d never seen the document. Until now.’

‘What did you know? That my grandma was a noblewoman? Doesn’t seem all that unusual among you lot.’

‘Yes, that too, of course. But the date was new to me. Do you see? 1662. That’s the year of the Battle of Nagyszőllős.’

‘Yes, and?’

‘Letters of nobility aren’t chronicles. They didn’t spell out exactly what the title was granted for. Hardly ever, at least. They’re about service and loyalty, and those are supposed to be timeless. But I’ll be damned if those services weren’t connected with the battle!’

I still had no idea what Dénes was getting at. What battle?

‘Nagyszőllős, January 1662. A village near Schäßburg. Groß-Alisch, in German. Apafy Mihály and Kemény János met there, and it was unusually brutal, even by the standards of the day.

They were both Prince of Transylvania at the same time, which meant, of course, that there was one prince too many. Kemény had the support of the Habsburgs, Apafy that of the Ottomans.

“Mohács” means anything to you, does it?’

‘Wasn’t there a battle there as well?’

‘Very good. Or rather, very bad. The country fell under Turkish rule and spent years in a state of emergency. Alliances shifted more often than seasons changed. One moment the Saxons were allied with the Hungarians, the next with the Habsburgs; then the Székelys switched to the Turks, and a few outsiders joined in for good measure.’

Dénes pushed a candlestick into the middle of the table.

‘That’s Schäßburg,’ he declared. ‘It’s where the two sides first confronted each other. Apafy had barricaded himself inside the town. Kemény couldn’t take it, so he withdrew to bring up reinforcements.

He returned the following January. But Apafy had received Ottoman horsemen as reinforcements too, and they were no use to him in a siege, of course. He had to fight a battle in the open!’

‘How do you know all this?’ I interrupted. ‘You’re a walking encyclopaedia!’

‘I’ll tell you later.’ Dénes seemed impatient.

‘So it was winter. Kemény marched on Schäßburg, found that Apafy had already left and followed him. That brought him into a valley from the east, with the sun behind him. Assuming it was shining!’

Dénes pulled the loaf of bread towards him and stood a little milk jug on top of it. It wobbled alarmingly.

‘Apafy had positioned his Turkish cavalry on the flank of a hill near the village’—the coffee cup moved behind the loaf—‘and there his infantry waited, ready to retreat between the houses if Kemény’s troops proved too strong.

The cavalry attacked the Habsburg army from the side, gathering momentum as they came down the slope. And that army wasn’t made up of Austrians alone, by the way. Hungarians fought for Vienna too. And Croats and Bavarians. But then this happened!’

Dénes sent the sausage rolling off its plate; a red, greasy stain spread across the wooden table.

‘Kemény fell from his horse. Right at the start of the battle! He was trampled to death in no time.’

Dénes, it seemed, couldn’t have given a sh — sausage about his table. He rolled his stand-in for the prince back and forth and tapped it with his fingers.

‘How dreadful!’ I pretended to be horrified, suppressing my giggles as best I could. ‘And what happened next?’

‘Exactly what you’d expect! The Habsburg troops panicked and fled towards the village—straight onto the spears of Apafy’s infantry.’

Chaos erupted across the kitchen table.

‘While the Hungarians had already begun stripping the corpses of anything worth taking, Kemény’s survivors sought refuge in the village church. Consecrated ground, sanctuary and all that. They hadn’t reckoned on having Muslims on their heels. The church meant nothing to them. They slaughtered every last one of them, outside the walls, in the churchyard, inside the church itself.’

Dénes took a deep breath.

‘It was a magnificent victory for Apafy. Now he was the only Prince of Transylvania.’

‘And you think …?’ I ventured.

‘I’m certain. Now that I know the date on the letter of nobility, I’m certain. Your ancestor István and his sons won at Nagyszőllős. And they were ennobled for it.’

‘But they were fighting against their own people, when you come down to it!’

‘True. But as I said,’ Dénes replied, ‘in Transylvania, your own people didn’t stay the same for very long.’

While the battle raged across the kitchen table, evening had fallen. Without a word of explanation, Dénes went outside, and when I followed him I saw that he was lighting a fire in a brick-built oven, with a gleaming grill rack propped against it. While I simply stood there watching the logs slowly turn to embers, he fetched meat from the fridge and opened a bottle of red wine. It seemed to be Swiss, a Pinot Noir. For a moment, the wine merchant in me felt compelled to comment, but Dénes beat him to it.

‘Drink!’ he ordered.

‘You’ve got a lot to digest, and there’ll be food to go with it in a moment. You can stay here tonight, don’t worry. There’s a guest room. About time somebody used it again.’

By the time we opened the second bottle, still outside, now beneath the stars, I knew not only a great deal more about my ancestors but a little more about Dénes as well. His family—for he was only an uncle by marriage—came from the far south-east of Transylvania, the corner where the Carpathians ‘take a sharp bend’, as he put it, ‘to embrace the whole land of the Hungarians and keep out what doesn’t belong there’.

‘Are you all so … er … conscious of your borders?’ I asked.

‘That’s a good way of putting it,’ Dénes said with a smile. ‘Yes, we are.

When you’ve lost every war you’ve had to fight for almost five hundred years, as we Hungarians have, you tend to pay rather more attention to the details than the victors do. And it runs in the family, in my case. Imagine, my grandfather was still an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army!’

‘Like Härr Oberlaitnant Lukasch in The Good Soldier Švejk?’ By now the red wine was clearly gaining the upper hand.

Dénes chuckled.

‘Perhaps—but only behind closed doors. All anyone saw was discipline and severity. My father inherited both, unfortunately, even though times had changed long before.’

‘Just as well you didn’t become a soldier. Otherwise we might not be sitting here.’

‘Possibly. Luckily, I was too young for the war. But my mother mattered much more. She was a pianist, loved art and everything beautiful. She’d have thrown herself off her grand piano if I’d ever come marching in wearing a uniform!’

‘So what did you do instead?’

‘Built cars. More or less. I’m an engineer, and I invented a few little details for a not entirely unknown manufacturer down in Swabia. They paid me so well I had to move to Switzerland.’

‘I see. But that still doesn’t explain how you know such a lot about battles.’

‘It’s not really the battles themselves that interest me. All that mindless hacking away at one another, killing out of fear of being killed, the hideous injuries and undignified deaths—that’s for the psycho-, patho- and other -logists.

What fascinates me is what lies behind them. The stories on the margins that so often get overlooked. How, for instance, did your four ancestors come to serve Apafy? Where did they come from? What were they doing in Schäßburg while they waited for the hour of battle? What did they do afterwards?

Or take the letter of nobility. What you’re carrying around with you is only a copy. Who made it? When? Where? Why? Had the person ever seen the original—or merely written down what they’d heard from someone else? And perhaps the most important question of all: does the original still exist? It would be remarkable for more than just its contents!’

‘What else? Why?’

‘Well,’ Dénes said after a short pause, lowering his voice a little, ‘because in those days they didn’t write such things on paper.

The loyalty rewarded by the title was meant to be reflected in the material itself. And what’s the most loyal thing there is?’

I stared at Dénes, whose face was now only faintly lit by the dying embers in the grill. My eyes fell on the two dachshunds, lying at his feet like a pair of shapeless sausages.

‘A dog?’ I asked, only half seriously. ‘But …’

‘Exactly,’ came the quiet reply from the darkness. ‘“Kutyabőr”, as we say in Hungary.

Letters of nobility were written on dogskin.’