Chapter 1 1. THE SNOW OF THE DYING century still lay on the edge of the dark forest when Lajos von Lázár, the translucent child with water-blue eyes, first glimpsed the man he would believe to be his father for his whole life and beyond. It was the evening of Epiphany. The forest swallowed the last of the murky blue light. The room where the child was born lay in the western wing of the manor house, right next to the one painted blue, which nobody ever entered. While the midwife washed the child's back, Sándor von Lázár stood at the window, scanning the forest. It was as if he had seen something vanish into the undergrowth. He was standing there, feeling the cold of the glass, sweeping the edge of the forest with his gaze, letting it wander across the bark of the tree trunks, when a sudden fissure opened up inside him. At once he felt that well-known anxiety, the familiar panic, course through his body, flooding everything. Then he blinked and the fissure closed. He breathed a sigh of relief. He was not like his brother, nor like his mother, just slightly unsettled, which should come as no surprise given that his wife had just given birth to a baby whose tiny organs were visible beneath its transparent skin. The baron ate dinner only in the company of his six-year-old daughter, who was not at all happy about the birth of her brother. When Ida, the German nanny, had taken Ilona to the room in the western wing, the girl had narrowed her brown eyes, looked very serious as she stared at this wrinkled, pale-blue, and bloated creature, and said drily, "He's very ugly." Then she had hurried over to her father, who, unsure as to why she looked so wan, had left the window closed, and she had vomited on his shiny leather shoes and brown-checked trousers. Now, after the baron had changed his clothes, the two of them were sitting at the dining table that was long enough to serve twenty guests a suckling pig, a goose, a pheasant, and three hares. They said nothing because they were used to Mária making the conversation. She was lying in soft satin pillows in the western wing, the child pressed to her breast, listening to his short breaths, Imre's constant clearing of his throat in the room next door, and the sounds of the house, feeling that she was sinking into the pillows, as if the pockets of her dark-blue cardigan were filled with heavy stones, whose weight was pulling her down, ever deeper, as she disappeared into the covers, mattress, and goose feathers. It was not a bad feeling, not a frantic falling or a panicked drowning, such as she knew from her dreams; it was a simple immersion, a silent receding from life; it was all she wanted. Ilona could tell that her father was still angry with her by the energetic way he was cutting up his red meat. She knew he could sense her eyes on him--he could tell at once when someone was looking at him--but she could not avert them from the thick, bushy moustache that danced above his chewing mouth. When her father looked up, she immediately turned her gaze to her huge plate. She did not understand how anybody could put such a coarse chunk of meat on such a beautiful plate of the most exquisite Herend porcelain, decorated with filigree butterflies, dragonflies, birds, and hazel twigs. Fortunately the chandelier was not lit, but the gas lamps on the papered walls showed more than enough. The trick was to focus on the golden upper rim of the plate, so it looked as if your eyes were on the food, whereas only at the bottom of your field of vision could you actually see what you were cutting up. She heard her father chewing and, without looking up, knew he was allowing his eyes to roam the room. He was proud of all these possessions, although even young Ilona knew that he had nothing to do with any of it and that they owed their wealth to the people staring down at them from the paintings, who never gave the merest hint of a smile despite the many jokes they were told. After dinner, Sándor moved to the adjoining smoking room, lit a cigar, and for a while paced up and down in silence. So far he had blocked out all thought of the newborn child, but now that he was alone, he could no longer fight against it. He smoked, frowned deeply, and thought hard, without being able to say what he was thinking about. Török, the country doctor, was equally astonished by the child: "I have to say, in all my years as a doctor I've never seen anything like this, my dear Baron. But the child appears to be healthy, its organs are functioning, and although the skin is extremely thin, it's holding up. Sunlight might be a danger to him, though." So the child was healthy, which did not make the situation any easier. A stillbirth would have been simple. At the thought of the next few years of his life, which would be determined by a see-through child, for the briefest moment Sándor considered lifting the baby from its mother's breast, putting a hand over its nose and mouth in the bathroom, and then replacing it on Mária's chest. This would allow him to continue living the life he was accustomed to, which he had arranged so as to maintain old traditions and create new ones, on a large scale as well as small, through the sedate progress of the years as well as in the convoluted haste of daily life. Already as a child he could not wait to tackle day-to-day business with the same solemnity as his father-- Pressing the dark-green signet ring into the red wax. Signing contracts. Receiving business associates. Pulling the pocket watch from his jacket. Raising the wineglass to his lips. Following his father's example, the baron conducted his life according to strict routine. He got up at sunrise, pushed the pine-green curtains aside so his wife would wake up too (he could not abide late sleepers), went into the bathroom to shave his cheeks, chin, and neck, rubbed olive oil into his moustache, and then got dressed in front of Mária's puffy eyes, to show her how efficient, well-groomed, and superior he was. Then he would go down to the dining room to read the newspaper. Mária did not get out of bed until she heard her husband's footsteps fade away in the hall. In the blue-tiled bathroom, she too picked up the razor, its handle still warm, and, with precise movements honed over the years, made small cuts in the soft, porcelain undersides of her arms, cuts so fine that there was hardly any blood and the wounds would close again after a few days. What remained was a barely visible patten of threadlike rosy scars that nobody ever noticed apart from Pál. The young groom saw them when, one unusually warm spring afternoon, he helped the baroness up onto her white horse and passed her the reins. The sleeves of Mária's light-blue blouse had ridden up, exposing her forearm. She could tell at once from Pál's water-blue eyes that he had seen the scars; for a moment he was even going to touch her forearm with his coarse hand, but then he merely said, "Why do you do that, most noble Baroness?" Mária had looked at the boy sympathetically, as if he were the one with the scarred arms, and then replied, "So I know I'm still alive." When Pál helped the baroness out of the saddle that evening, he was just as sad as he had been three hours earlier. Mária felt as if she had not seen this boy properly before. She gave him a tender smile; he turned bright red and hurried into the stable with the saddle. But Mária followed the groom, marvelling at his broad shoulders, and when she was just a few paces behind him she cleared her throat almost silently. Nine months later Lajos was born. Excerpted from Lázár: A Novel by Nelio Biedermann All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
