1937, and reared in the war-torn village of Molnar. That much was part of the official record.
But as for the rest of it?
There could be no doubt that the old woman was telling the truth as she remembered it. And yet what did it mean?
Peter Novak: the man who never was.
Amid a growing unease, possibilities fluttered through Janson's mind, like shuffled and reshuffled index cards.
Jessie unzipped her knapsack, took out the picture book on Peter Novak, and opened it to a color close-up of the great man. She showed it to Gitta Bekesi.
"See this fellow? His name is Peter Novak."
The old woman glanced at the picture and looked at Jessie, shrugging. "I do not follow the news. I have no television, take no newspapers. Forgive me. But, yes, I think I have heard of this man."
"Same name as the count's boy. Sure it couldn't be the same person?"
"Peter, Novak - common names in our country," she said, shrugging. "Of course this is not Ferenczi-Novak's son. He died in 1942. I told you." Her eyes returned to the photograph. "Besides, this man's eyes are brown." The point seemed to her almost too obvious to belabor, but she added, "Little Peter's were blue, like the waters of the Balaton. Blue, like his mother's."
In a state of shock, the two began the long walk back to the Lancia, one mile up the hill. As the house receded into the overgrowth, they began to talk, slowly, tentatively, exploring the deepening mystery.
"What if there was another child?" Jessie asked. "Another kid nobody knew about, who took on his brother's name. A hidden twin, maybe."
"The old woman seemed certain that he was their only one. Not an easy thing to hide from the household staff. Of course, if Count Ferenczi-Novak was as paranoid as his reputation had it, any number of ruses are conceivable."
"But why? He wasn't crazy."
"Not crazy, but desperately fearful for his kid," Janson said. "Hungarian politics was in an incredibly explosive condition. Remember what you've read. Bela Kun took power in March 1919, ruled for a hundred and thirty-three days. A reign of terror. That was followed, once he'd been toppled, by an even more horrifying massacre of the people who helped him gain power. Whole families were slaughtered - Admiral Hor-thy's so-called White Terror. Reprisals and counter-reprisals were just a way of life back then. The count might have felt that what comes around goes around. That his association with Prime Minister Kallay could be a death sentence, not just for him but for his family."
"He was afraid of the Communists?"
"The Fascists and the Communists both. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in late forty-four and early forty-five after the Arrow Cross took over. Remember, these Arrow Cross were people who thought Horthy was too lax! True homegrown Hungarian Nazis. When the Red Army took control of the country, you had another round of purges. Hundreds of thousands were killed, again. Enemies of the revolution, right? People like Ferenczi-Novak were caught in a pincer. How many instances are there of that kind of ideological whiplash - a country switching from far left to far right to far left again, with nothing in between?"
"So we're back to the old question: How do you bring a child into that world? Maybe these guys thought they couldn't. That any child of theirs would have to be hidden."
"Moses in the basket of bulrushes and pitch," Janson mused. "But that raises a lot more questions. Novak tells the world that these are his parents. Why?"
"Because it's the truth?"
"Not good enough. A child like that would have been raised to be afraid of the truth, to regard the truth as a very dangerous thing - for Christ's sake, he might not even know the truth. That's the thing about a child: you can't tell him what he can't deal with. In Nazi Germany, when a Jewish toddler was hidden by a Christian family, the child wouldn't, couldn't, be told the truth. The risk was too great: he might say something inappropriate to his playmates, to a teacher. The only way to protect him from the consequences of a potentially deadly truth was to keep him in ignorance of that truth. Only later, when the child was grown, would he be told. Besides, if Novak's parents were who he said they were, this Gitta Bekesi would know about it. I feel sure of it. I don't think they had another child. I think she told us the truth: