ILLY È S, Gyula

People of the Puszta

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It was, after all, from her usual world where, in the cynical village proverb, “only bread is not shared.” Had she a fiancé? Both she and her fiancé were born into a world where the reader would find it difficult to find his feet, even having read thus far, where faithfulness can exist without physical fidelity. Both of them must have known that, like the bites of gnats and lice, there exist other kinds of bites and stings against which there is virtually no defence, but which can have as little effect upon one’s honour or one’s spirit as the former. The people of the pusztas are realists. After all even I, a child, knew this view of the world and regarded it as natural. I both saw and heard many expressions of it which only now, in retrospect, give me cause for reflection. “Oh the old swine!” said the farm servants not long before this episode, of the old steward when the news got around that – in the strict sense of the word – he had been abusing the 12-14-year-old girls as they bent over the low troughs in the granaries where the wheat was washed… “Is that right for such an old lame creature?” All their head-shaking and indignation was directed at him; nobody gave a thought to the girls. Not even the estate which in such cases, as in every other sphere, took action only if it thought its interests were endangered. On another occasion it became clear that one of the overseers of the day-labourers, whenever he was ordered to supervise the machines or maize-hoeing or thinning out the root-crops, always selected the same three girls for his gang and always made them fetch water, which was the lightest work. True, they were not yet of age. When it became known that he had “made use of them”, it was only the woeful pleadings of his wife and five children re-echoing through the puszta that prevented his dismissal. And not for moral reasons, but for his lapse of discipline. The puszta followed his family’s fate with sympathy and anxiety.

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