Csardas [antikvár]

AUTHOR'S NOTE For a writer to tackle a subject in which the country, social background, and temperament of the people are outside his or her inherent knowledge is the height of impertinence. But writers are impertinent. They also frequently become obsessed by themes outside their own experience, and once a writer is obsessed there is nothing to do but give way and indulge the obsession. Csardas is the result of my obsession. The title (the cs is pronounced ch as in church the s at the end is sh, as in brush', thus, phonetically, chardash) came to me while watching a very old couple dancing this courtship dance at a village in the mountains of Northern Hungary. The old man was very tall, very thin; his wife - dressed in the black skirt and kerchief of the country people - was a diminutive little lady who was as wide as she was high and who barely came up to her husband's chest. They should have looked incongruous and funny together but they were neither, and such was their grace that soon the younger and more energetic dancers stopped to watch and finally applaud. The faces of the old people were marked by years of harsh living - two world wars, innumerable revolutions, foreign occupation, in addition to the general hardship of just being poor (the lot of the Hungarian peasant has never been an easy one) - but as I watched I suddenly saw them, fifty years back, as they once had been: a strong, handsome young man and a neat little brown-eyed peasant girl. And between that young couple and the old people now before me lay the whole brave, bloody, dignified, cruel story of the Hungarian people. To list everyone who has helped me with this book would be impossible, and indeed, perhaps they would not wish to be listed, for Csardas may not be the kind of book they had