Reparation

by Gaby Koppel

  “I’ll steer clear of your office politics. But I thought you’d want to know we’ve arrested a Nachmann Cohen of Stamford Hill.”

  “Oh my God. Nachmann. Bruchi’s uncle? The mother’s weird brother? What’s he charged with?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  “On what basis have you arrested him?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “Do you suspect him of being the murderer?”

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  “Is there any evidence against him?”

  “Do you have any?”

  “Not unless you count the fact that he is extremely odd, and unmarried.”

  “If being single over thirty was a crime I could come and arrest you too.”

  “Is that a police joke? Excuse me for not laughing.”

  “OK. But I’m just trying to point out that being single is not a crime.”

  “Of course not, but it is strange for Stamford Hill. I’ve met enough people up there to realise that different rules apply for the extremely orthodox. The great thing about arranged marriages seems to be that nobody needs to be left on the shelf, however much they lack either social skills or sex appeal. So when it comes to Nachmann Cohen, you simply have to ask why he’s not married.”

  “I can’t see a judge going for it on that basis, I’m afraid.”

  “Which leaves you where?”

  Jenkins sighs. “OK, strictly off the record then – he was present, had the opportunity. His alibi is that he was at the party, but no one can remember whether he was actually present all of the time. He could have easily slipped out.”

  “And if you can’t get any more than that?”

  “There is some other evidence I can’t go into, but I don’t think we’ve got enough to charge him by a long chalk. If I can’t get anything else, I’ll have to release him by tomorrow morning.”

  “Shit. Do you have a gut feeling that he’s the one?”

  “As you say, there’s something odd going on.” I wonder if I should tell DI Jenkins what I’ve found out about the community protecting and hiding people suspected of child abuse. If Nachmann did anything, or his family even suspect it, heaven knows what they’d do to protect him. That hardly counts as evidence, though. I put the phone down.

  Chapter 24

  “What do you want to do, then?” I’ve found Mutti smoking in the tiny, weed-filled courtyard that Madame refers to in her tangled English as “the garden”.

  “Well,” she says, “I think we take the cable car up to the castle and then later we swim in Gellert baths. This you will absolutely love. I will show you the Liszt Academy – you know this is where I studied the violin – and then the opera house, and the museums.” By now she is in full flow. “And of course the parliament building is an absolute must. It has a wonderful Gothic style, with some Baroque and also Romanesque details. In some ways quite similar to Westminster parliament.”

  “Well if it is like the Westminster parliament,” I snap, “we could save ourselves a lot of effort and go to see the one in London.” She looks squashed. “Mutti, we’ve got twenty-four hours, not a week. And I thought the whole point of being here was to pursue the compensation, not some sort of sightseeing jolly. Mad as that sounds, don’t you want to at least have a go? Have you got any contacts at all?”

  She looks at her fingernails with a petulant moue, picks up her cigarettes, turns them over in her hands, and puts them down again.

  “Did you notice the horse-drawn carriages on the way here?” she pleads. “We make a short round trip of the principal sights, no? I’m sure Madame Eszterházy can get us a deal.”

  “Mutti, get real.”

  “OK, is OK.” She takes a deep breath. “We can meet an old friend.”

  “Yes?” I’d assumed all her old mates had died or left the country. Most of her cousins and her girlfriend Clari are all in America. She’s never mentioned anybody here before.

  “Who is she?” She says nothing, but fiddles with her cigarette holder.

  “Mutti?” She’s blushing.

  “He.”

  “Are you trying to tell me this is – an old boyfriend?”

  “Mmmm.” She looks away. “Fiancé.”

  “Don’t tell me – one of the two you had simultaneously back in the day?” She looks up to meet my eyes and nods.

  “So who is he? Who was he?”

  “You know…”

  “Let me guess…”

  “…nice Jewish boy.” That could be a barb. But Dave is far from Mutti’s thoughts. “Good family. A lawyer.” The nice Jewish lawyer. He wasn’t for me at all. Does that mean my father was second best? The one she really wanted got away.

  “So what happened?” Her lips move, and her hand gestures in the air. But there is no sound. Then she manages to whisper, “Everything. Everything changed.” She shakes her head.

  “But you’d like to meet him? Will you be OK about that?”

  “Ja, ja.”

  “Is he definitely still around?” She picks up her handbag, searches through it and pulls out a battered letter.

  One hour later, we are on the terrace of Café Gerbeaud, which Mutti wants me to appreciate is the city’s most legendary coffee house, but strikes me as being on the kitsch end of baroque. I have allowed her to smoke one cigarette. Then I sent her to the ladies to brush her teeth. You don’t want to meet the man of your dreams after nearly fifty years smelling like an ashtray.

  At four o’clock, a man approaches our table. He’s wearing a jacket over a black polo-necked jumper, like a jazz musician from the 1950s. Steel grey hair has been brilliantined into a corrugated sheet. Mutti gets up. He takes her hand, kisses it and says, “Szervusz, Editca, szervusz.” I notice a large gold signet ring on a brown hand. If history hadn’t condemned the gesture forever, he would click his heels.

  The tooth-brushing was unnecessary, because the first thing Michael does is to take out a packet of Kent cigarettes. He seems surprised when I decline, shaking the packet at me with a twinkle, “They are American, you know. Very good.” Mutti and Michael talk in a confusing mixture of English, Hungarian and German. Sentences start in one language and glide into another. Names are thrown in – and ticked off. There is a lot of talk about America – Cincinatti, Chicago, New York. Then Sydney and Melbourne. London seems to be a sideshow in the Hungarian émigré world, let alone Cardiff. Wales is not on the map. I follow some of the conversation. But I’m uncomfortable playing gooseberry to my own mother, so I leave them both to their memories while I go round the block, looking in shop windows. When I get back, the ashtray is full.

  “So, Erzsébet,” says Michael to me, using the Hungarian version of my name. “Excuse us. We have a lot to catch up. I am happy that your mother has such a beautiful daughter.” He turns to Mutti, “And to find Aranca looking so wonderful. Almost unchanged.”

  His ornate compliments make me cringe, but they elicit a coy smile from Mutti, and a dismissive, playful hand gesture. My God, he’s teasing her. What a terrible flirt.

  “It’s nice to meet you, too, Michael.”

  “You like Budapest? Your first time here?”

  “Yes, it’s great. It’s kind of sad too.”

  “Sad? What is sad?”

  “The lovely buildings looking so run down.” He shrugs.

  “We are not a rich country. But not so poor as others in Eastern Europe.”

  “It reminds me of Paris…”

  “But,” he pre-empts me, “shabbier.”

  “Sorry, it’s obviously not an original thought.”

  “It’s not so bad here – so you know Poland or Latvia? Even when we had the Iron Curtain we always had more freedom than other countries. Intellectual life went on, more-or-less in the open. Best of both worlds. Communism, but not too communist. And we ate, we always ate. No food queues. And now the Iron Curtain gone, will get better. Believe me.”

  “It feels like a place you can’t escape from history.”
/>   “Of course not, but we love our history. The good AND the bad.”

  “Don’t the bullet holes in the buildings just remind you of things you’d rather forget?”

  “Bullet holes?”

  “So many of the lovely buildings are pock marked by bullet holes. Nobody has even bothered to fill them in.”

  “Maybe they aren’t bullet holes.”

  I look at him, to see if he’s joking.

  “OK, maybe they are bullet holes. London’s the same. You don’t see it because that’s the way it’s always been for you. You had the bombing, I think.”

  I smile. It’s odd to think this man could have been my father. Then I wouldn’t be here. One can’t unravel the past. As Michael says, you have to make it work for you.

  “Has Mutti told you why we are here?” I ask him. Mutti’s shaking her head at me. But I’m going to plough on, whether she wants me to or not. There’s no point being overcome by good manners now that we’re here.

  “I think you come to see old friends and re-live the tragic history of this century. Yes?” says Michael. Very good. I wonder if his irony is born of the ancien régime, the communist one or post-communist. It doesn’t matter really, I’m not prepared to play games.

  “I think you already know there’s another reason,” I say. All of a sudden, Mutti makes a majestic gesture at the waiter.

  “Champagne,” she commands. “Very cold.” There’s an air of desperation, she’d rather dodge the awkward questions. But now that we’re here I want to ask and ask and ask. And champagne, what is that going to cost? There’s a big difference in the price of sparkling Hungarian and the real French stuff. The way she’s playing dowager duchess, they may well bring us a £100 bottle of Cristal. The waiter buzzes around with an elaborate, free-standing ice bucket, and the cork pops out of the bottle. We drink a toast to our trip. And then another one to the new, re-born Hungarian state. And then, I try to turn the conversation back.

  “So,” I say, “you were asking about the reason for our visit.”

  “But Michael,” interrupts Mutti , “you must tell me, do you go to the opera? I’ve heard it is still wonderful.” I kick her under the table. Michael doesn’t appear to notice.

  “The opera is excellent,” he says. “And of course, the tickets are very much more affordable than other world leading operas in London, Paris and so forth. You must go.”

  “Sadly, we are flying home tomorrow,” I say, glaring at Mutti. She ignores me. Again.

  “Ach, I remember my first visit to the opera. I must have been around nine years old. I was so excited about the lovely red dress my daddy bought me to wear, with lots of layers of netting underneath to push out the skirt.”

  This could go on for some time. Mutti waxing on about the splendid life in pre-war Hungary, as enjoyed by the moneyed bourgeoisie. Michael and I smile at each other.

  Mutti beckons to the waiter to top up our glasses, “Isn’t this fun?”

  “Yes,” I say. “And now I’m going to tell Michael about the reason for our trip. Which will also be lots of fun. I promise.”

  Mutti listens, as I spell out our claim for compensation, nodding at intervals and interrupting with irrelevant points. Michael smiles, but each time he relaxes his face takes on a look which is grave and kind of disapproving.

  The waiter brings a fresh ashtray. Michael opens a new packet of Kent and lights one up. “You know,” he says, “there are people in Hungary who…are unhappy about the idea of compensation, however limited. Even this $150 you mention, which appears on the face of it to be a sum so small, that it is insulting. So insulting that it has now been raised to $1500. If everybody who is in fact eligible claims, the sums involved could come to – who knows? – many millions. Where is this money coming from?”

  “So, you think the principle of compensation is wrong?” I ask. He ignores my question.

  “Most of this money will go abroad. As we have said, Hungary is not a wealthy country. We are just emerging from a difficult phase in our political history. State is letting go of many enterprises. New enterprises are forming. Not a good time to lose so much of our capital abroad, when we are just learning about how to be capitalists.”

  I try to respond to this, but he waves me down. “And if you compensate for victims of Nazi era – not just Jews, but gypsies and people who were called ‘sexual deviant’ or ‘political deviant’, what about victims of Stalinism? Political prisoners? What about victims of First War? Where do you draw the line? Why just victims of Nazis get compensation, when there were other victims too? Many Hungarians suffered under communism. People lost homes, businesses, property. Their lives. But our country has to move forward. We can’t rewind the clock back to 1944. And why pick out one particular moment in our difficult history to say – the people who suffered then, they should get compensation. The others not.”

  “Look, Michael, Mutti and I aren’t responsible for the whole country and its tortured history. Just ourselves. And our claim is quite simple. My grandfather owned industrial and residential property worth a lot of money. It was confiscated by the Hungarian government, and he was killed. Now it’s payback time.”

  He picks up his box of cigarettes from the table, lights one and draws on it, looking reflective.

  “I understand your mother feels maybe – that she was cheated out of the life she expected. Believe me, I know, I was there. Her family lived in wonderful style. Have you seen pictures of their home? Yes? The height of elegance. Everything was the best. Furnishing fabrics from Paris, glassware from Italy. Tablecloths embroidered with real gold thread. Your grandparents were among the smartest people in town. Is heartbreaking to lose everything. Believe me, I know.

  “But was long time ago. Your mother was young when it happened. She was lucky. She escaped to the West. She married a man who was kind and – a wonderful coincidence, he also was an entrepreneur with a factory and lived in just the same kind of milieu that Aranca had grown up in. And they had you, to be brought up with every comfort. At a time when people in Hungary were living with the discomforts of communism.”

  “Look, Michael,” I butt in, “You can’t guilt-trip me because I was brought up in the West. It doesn’t work like that.”

  “Doesn’t it? You have enjoyed – what do you call it? The Good Life. Is that the phrase? But maybe things are not so good any more? Maybe money is a bit tight back at home?”

  At this, I can feel my face turning pink. He’s right of course. If my parents hadn’t run out of money we wouldn’t be here.

  “Ah, so I’ve hit a nerve, I think. Maybe things at home are not so comfortable as they were in the past. Now you have – what do you call it? – a cash crisis? And you want some of ours. Because you have discovered that this country is no longer as poor as it once was. So you come over here and want to take something from us, at the very moment when we are trying to build our country back up. Is that fair? Some Hungarians think that is greedy.”

  I don’t know how much attention Mutti is paying to the conversation. She’s been looking disinterested for a while, and fiddling with the bits of foil from her cigarette packet. Now she summons the waiter to pour the last of the champagne. Michael puts his hand over his glass, so most of it ends up in Mutti’s. She swigs it back.

  “If so many people are against the compensation scheme, then why don’t you stop it? Isn’t that what democracy is supposed to have achieved?”

  “My dear girl, don’t be so naïve. We understand very well how necessary a little bit of hypocrisy is to make the world go round. I’m not speaking for myself, you understand. But I want you to know how it will be seen if you decide to go forward.”

  “Michael, I can’t speak for other people with other problems which happened at other times. We’ll never bring my grandfather back, but we have a very small chance of getting back the property. I’m asking for your help. If you don’t want to give it then we will ask somebody else.”

  I stand up and reach for my han
dbag. He takes a sip from his champagne glass, then leans back in his chair and flaps his hands to tell me to sit down.

  “Look, I didn’t mean to insult you. It is a difficult thing, you ask. Maybe I cannot help you myself. I will see who could help, and I’ll call you tomorrow.” Tomorrow we’ll be on a flight out of here, and he knows that.

  Mutti hasn’t said anything for a while. She drains her glass, rises to her feet, and stands there swaying.

  “Now I know why I left when I did,” she says at the top of her voice. “This country is full of cowards, toe-the-line men. Nobody wants to upset the boat,” she yells at Michael. “You know exactly what went on. You were there, but now you want to just brush it away, pretend it didn’t happen. Let everybody just forget the nasty truth.” The other customers on the terrace are craning their necks to see what the fuss is about.

  Mutti lurches away, leaving me sitting there opposite Michael. He looks at me as though he thinks I’m about to apologise. Well, I’m not. For once, she’s right. And she’s perfectly entitled to get pissed. The only thing I am concerned that she’s marching down the street without me, and I have no idea where she’s going.