Summary
A war-orphaned foundling, sired by no one and everyone, drifts like smoke across the Magyar flatlands; branded by peasants with the epithet “son of the warrior,” he grows into a sinewy youth whose gaze already carries the weight of centuries. Between sun-bleached sheaves and the Danube’s mercury hush he learns that land is measured not in acres but in blood. When the recruiting Hussars gallop through the village, their pennants whipping the sky into crimson ribbons, he sees a ladder out of namelessness and clutches it—only to discover each rung is a bayonet. The barracks become a cathedral of iron: there Ica von Lenkeffy’s countess, cloistered in silk and ancestral guilt, first notices the private whose cheekbones hold the same shadows as the stone martyrs in her family crypt. Their trajectories intersect in a forest chapel where candle-flame writes gilded psalms across her collarbone; one stolen kiss and the world tilts. Károly Lajthay’s general—half father, half carrion crow—smells mutiny in the boy’s sudden erect spine and ships him to the Italian front as cannon fodder. Mud, phosgene, frostbite: months collapse into a single hallucination of trench-foot and lullabies hummed in a language the soldier has almost forgotten. He deserts under a sky bruised purple, carrying only a rusted harmonica and the memory of her scent—lilac over gunpowder. Crossing back through the Carpathians he finds villages razed, the countess’s estate converted into a field hospital where she, now shorn of title and vanity, sponges fever from strangers. They recognize each other amid the dying; between them passes a silence denser than history. Together they flee toward the coast, a mismatched caravan of deserters, Roma fiddlers, and a one-eyed cinematographer who believes film can outrun death. In a fog-choked Adriatic port they barter the general’s stolen medals for passage on a coal freighter, but the war’s long arm reaches the pier: spotlights, barking rifles, separation. She is marched toward a tribunal; he, shackled, toward the gallows. At dawn, the rope already chafing his throat, a revolutionary mob storms the prison; in the chaos he escapes, limping toward the docks where the freighter’s silhouette dissolves into gold—without him. Years later, a scarred silhouette stands at the rail of a Danube ferry, hair silvered, eyes still burning. He carries a tin harmonica and a reel of nitrate film that no projector can accommodate: inside its frames the countess forever walks across a sunlit courtyard, her dress blooming like poppies, the war nothing but a scratched emulsion.
