Kingdom of Shadows Read Free

ago. He unfolded the fabric, revealing a silver cross on a faded ribbon, black and gold, the colors of Austria-Hungary. “This he sent to you.”
    Polanyi sighed. “Sandor,” he said, as though the coachman could hear him. He picked up the medal, let it lie flat on his open hand. “A Silver Cross of Valor. You know, Nicholas, I’m honored, but this is worth something.”
    Morath nodded. “I offered it to the daughter, with your kindest sympathies, but she wouldn’t hear of it.”
    “No. Of course not.”
    “When is it from?”
    Polanyi thought for a time. “The late eighties, as near as I can work it out. A Serbian rising, down in the Banat. Sandor was a sergeant, in the regiment raised in Pozsony. It was Pressburg then.”
    “Bratislava, now.”
    “The same place, before they gave it to the Slovaks. Anyhow, he used to talk about it, now and then. The Serbs gave them a hard time, they had snipers up in the caves, on the hillsides. Sandor’s company spent a week dealing with that—some villages had to be burnt down—and he got the cross.”
    “He wanted you to have it.”
    Polanyi nodded that he understood. “Is anything left, up there?”
    “Not much. They stripped the house, after the border moved. Doorknobs, windows, the good floors, fireplace brick, chimneys, whatever pipe they could get out of the walls. The livestock’s long gone, of course. Some of the vineyard remains. The older fruit trees.”
    “
Nem, nem, soha,”
Polanyi said. No, no, never—the Hungarian rejection of Trianon, the treaty that took away two thirds of its land and people after the Austro-Hungarian army was defeated in the Great War. There was more than a touch of irony in Polanyi’s voice when he said it, a shrug,
all we can do is whine,
but that wasn’t all. In some sense, complex, possibly obscure, he meant it.
    “One day, perhaps, it comes back.”
    The group at the next table had been attentive. One pugnacious little man, balding, nostrils flared, the reek of his mildewed room floating over their aperitifs, said
“Revanchiste.”
He didn’t say it to them, quite, or to his friends, perhaps he meant it for the world at large.
    They looked at him.
Revanchist, irredentist Hungarian fascists,
he meant, seething with Red Front indignation. But Morath and Polanyi were not that, they were of the Hungarian Nation, as the nobility was called, Magyars with family histories that went back a thousand years, and they were quite prepared, with chair leg and wine bottle, to throw the whole crowd out into the rue Beaujolais.
    When the group at the next table had returned, ostentatiously, to minding its own business, Polanyi carefully folded the medal back into its wrapping and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket.
    “He spent a long time dying,” Morath said. “Not in pain, and he wasn’t sad—he just had a hardheaded soul, it didn’t want to go.”
    From Polanyi, a tender little snort of pleasure as he tasted the veal.
    “Also,” Morath went on, “he wanted me to tell you something.”
    Polanyi raised his eyebrows.
    “It had to do with the death of his grandfather, who was ninety-five, he thought, and who had died in the same bed. The family knew the time had come, they were all gathered around. Suddenly, the old man became agitated and started to talk. Sandor had to lean close in order to hear him. ‘Remember,’ he whispered, ‘life is like licking honey . . .’ He said it three or four times, and Sandor could tell there was more. At last, he managed—‘licking honey off a thorn.’ ”
    Polanyi smiled, acknowledging the story. “It’s been twenty years,” he said, “since I saw him. When it was no longer Hungary, I didn’t want anything to do with it, I knew it would be destroyed.” He took a sip of the wine, then more. “You want some, Nicholas? I’ll have them bring a glass.”
    “No, thank you.”
    “I wouldn’t go up there,” Polanyi said. “That was weak. And I knew it.” He shrugged,