Burning Cold

by Lisa Lieberman

  Lázár was too despondent to care. He’d disappeared without taking a curtain call and as soon as we could extricate ourselves politely from the group of well-wishers in the café, the three of us went upstairs and knocked on the door of his apartment. There was no response.

  “Try talking to him, najdroższa,” my husband prompted. “He’s fond of you.”

  “Monsieur Lázár?” Still no answer. Was he okay? I hoped he hadn’t harmed himself. Raising my voice, I knocked again. “Monsieur Lázár?”

  “J’arrive.” We heard the sound of approaching footsteps. “C’est toi, Cara?”

  “Oui, monsieur. Pouvons-nous entrer?”

  “Je vous en prie.”

  The door opened and a disheveled Lázár appeared in his shirtsleeves, looking as if he’d aged a decade since we’d seen him last. Wearily he ushered us into a room cluttered with broken antiques. He gestured toward a set of more-or-less-intact Louis XV salon chairs, but sitting on the Persian rug on the floor seemed like a safer bet. With Jakub translating for Gray and me, the puppeteer filled us in on the crisis. The police had opened fire on the protesters, he told us, killing hundreds and wounding thousands more. Soviet forces stationed in Hungary had been summoned to the government’s aid. The first Russian tanks were already rolling into the city. Russian planes flew overhead.

  We all sat there, stunned. Tanks and planes and soldiers, all massed against the people of Budapest. They didn’t have a chance.

  “What about his family?” I asked. The puppeteer was so downcast I was afraid something terrible had happened to someone he loved.

  Jakub explained that Lázár had telephoned his sister in Budapest the minute our production had ended. She and her husband were safe, but their son, a student at the technical university, had been wounded in the battle outside the radio station. His friends had managed to carry him home and his injuries, fortunately, were not fatal, but our landlord was sick with anxiety. I wished there were something I could say to raise his spirits—he was so low—but I’d experienced enough sorrow in my twenty-three years to know there are times when keeping company in silence is the most we can do for one another.

  My beautiful mother, Vivien, had drowned when I was ten. The loss of her became part of who I was, tinging even my happiest moments with regret. I’d grown used to her absence, I’d been motherless for so long, but that didn’t stop me from wondering what it would have been like to have had Vivien in my life as I was growing up. She would have consoled me, the first time my heart was broken, I was sure of it. Wasn’t that what mothers did? Instead, I’d run off to England with Gray, burying my pain inside. I’d tried so hard to convince myself that I didn’t need anyone, but it didn’t work. I’d plunged into another love affair and was hurt again. Then Jakub came along and I discovered I wanted to be with him every minute of every day. Needing somebody wasn’t a bad thing if that person needed you too.

  When we got married, I wore the pearls Father had given Vivien on their wedding day. She was already pregnant when she’d walked down the aisle, carrying me. “Imagine that you are carrying her,” said Father, fastening them around my neck. He’d loved her dearly and for his sake, I attempted to conjure her presence, but wearing those pearls next to my skin stirred up old feelings of abandonment. You’re missing everything, I found myself thinking. So many years had passed—and I know this sounds unfair—but I could not bring myself to forgive Vivien for dying and leaving me to grow up without her.

  Lázár could not forgive himself for being in Paris, safe and sound, instead of joining the struggle in Budapest. “J’aurais dû revenir,” he lamented. I should have gone back. Ever since Stalin died there’d been signs of unrest, he told us, some subtle, others too obvious to ignore, indications that his countrymen were uniting to throw off the Soviet yoke. And yet he had ignored all of them.

  “Ask him what kind of signs,” said Gray. He made a point of being up-to-date on world events, but very little of what went on behind the Iron Curtain was reported in the West.

  Jakub reeled off a series of events related to him by the puppeteer. Following Hungary’s defeat to West Germany in the 1954 World Cup, hundreds of thousands of disappointed soccer fans protested in the streets. They weren’t only upset about their team’s loss; they were manifesting their dissatisfaction with the regime. Next came the discontented rumblings of students, artists, and intellectuals, who began holding public forums to air their grievances, meetings that attracted hundreds, then thousands. Soon they were publishing their criticism in pamphlets and underground newspapers that circulated hand-to-hand.

  Abruptly, Lázár got up and went to rummage through the drawers of a walnut secretary, returning with a sheaf of mimeographed pages fastened at the corner with a brass rivet. “Regardez ceci,” he said, thrusting the manuscript at Jakub. It was a copy of a clandestine magazine that published the work of enemies of the Hungarian state. A Rideg Valóság was the title. The Cold Truth. Lázár’s brother-in-law was one of the editors and had smuggled him out a copy of the first issue.

  “Does he mean presumed enemies of the Hungarian State, or are we talking about bona fide traitors?” Gray wanted to know. Most of the time he viewed world events with cynical detachment, but I could see he was really wrapped up in this story.

  “Presumed enemies,” my husband answered after consulting with our landlord, “but in Hungary, you must understand, that meant just about anybody.”

  Lázár proceeded to explain, via Jakub, how so many Hungarians had come to be branded as enemies. The country’s Stalinist leader, Mátyás Rákosi, had jailed thousands in the early 1950s, tyrannizing the population into submission with the help of his ruthless secret police, the ÁVH, who recruited a network of informers. Friends and neighbors betrayed one another at the drop of a hat; people you’d known for years cut you dead, crossing to the other side of the street to avoid you. Nobody was above suspicion and nobody could be trusted. Not even relatives.

  Some of the regime’s victims had composed poetry while they were in prison, recollections of sunlit days in the past, preserved in words like amber. Lacking pencils or paper, they’d spoken their poetry aloud, committing it to memory. And when one of their fellow inmates died, the others strove to capture his spirit in a poem. Jakub was holding the result of their labors.

  The sky outside was lightening with the approach of dawn, and I thought we should all be getting to bed, but now that we’d gotten him going, Lázár seemed to want us to stay. He’d ordered a bottle of whiskey from the bar downstairs and he and my brother were keeping apace with their drinking, sip for sip, glass for glass. Jakub had barely touched his glass, I was glad to see; at the rate Gray was going, it would take the two of us to get him back to his hotel. It seemed like the right moment to interrupt the history lesson.

  “Please,” I said, “s’il vous plaît, monsieur, nous lire un poème.” I wanted to hear the sound of one of those poems, even if I couldn’t understand the words.

  Lázár leafed through the typewritten pages. He seemed to be looking for one poem in particular. “Voilà!” he said when he came upon it. He recited it first in Hungarian, then in French. It was quite short, almost a haiku. Translating it required very little effort on my part.

  “Winter death

  “Your name is no secret.

  “War could not claim him

  “Only this: cold despair

  “Oh, brave Jónás.”

  Well before the puppeteer gave us the words in French, Gray’s eyes had filled with tears. “Who wrote that?” he asked, setting his glass of whiskey on the rug to fish a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and blow his nose.

  I understood why the poem had affected him so deeply. It moved me too. Three years earlier, racist thugs in England had murdered a man he loved, Dory, a Trinidadian who sang with a calypso band. My brother wrote a play to honor our friend’s memory, just as this unknown
poet had done for his fellow inmate. “Out of Place” was still playing on the West End. I’d seen it several times, and every time the Dory character died, I grieved for him all over again, so fully had Gray brought the man we knew to life. I envied him his gift, the way he used words to reveal what was in his heart. Nobody who saw his play could fail to emerge from the theater unaffected by the terrible tragedy of Dory’s death. He possessed the power to make people pay attention to what really mattered.

  “Szabó Zoltán,” Lázár replied when Jakub asked the name of the poet. Then he corrected himself: “Zoltán Szabó.” For some reason, Hungarians put the last name first.

  “Szabó,” I said. “What a funny coincidence.” Szabó was Father’s name before he changed it to Walden. The word meant tailor, a not uncommon profession for Jews in Europe. The family had been in the clothing business for generations, rising from humble tailors to found a menswear line that was sold in Hungary’s finest shops. I’d probably come by my skill with a needle genetically.

  Gray was shaking his head in disbelief. “It’s more of a coincidence than you realize, Cara. Zoltán Szabó is the name of our Hungarian half brother.”

  “Half brother! What are you talking about?”

  “I didn’t think you had any relatives left in Hungary,” said Jakub.

  “Qu’est-qu’il y a? Savez-vous de lui?”

  Jakub turned to Lázár. “Pas moi, mais ils pensent qu’il est leur frère.”

  “Leur frère? C’est incroyable!”

  “Unbelievable,” I echoed, having gotten the gist of the exchange. Surely I’d have known if I had a brother somewhere in Hungary.

  “I didn’t say he was actually our brother,” corrected Gray in the patronizing tone that used to drive me crazy. “I just said he has the same name as Father’s son by his first marriage.”

  “First marriage! Are you telling me he was married back in Hungary? And there were other children?”

  “Just the one child, Zoltán. He was still quite small when Father left his family for another woman. It caused a terrible scandal at the time, his absconding. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the reason he changed his name.”

  “How did you find out?” It bugged me, that Gray knew something about our Father that I didn’t.

  “My mother was the other woman. When he ran off with that Vegas showgirl, she told me everything.”

  “Out of spite, do you mean?”

  My brother shrugged. “Indubitably.”

  I’d never met Gray’s mother, but I had no difficulty believing she had it in her, judging from her onscreen presence. Dark-haired and exotic-looking, she was cast as a vamp at the outset of her Hollywood career, but her strong accent consigned her to dragon lady parts when talkies came in. I found her terrifying in those pictures and couldn’t imagine her in the maternal role. Like me, Gray had been shipped off to boarding school at a young age. Unlike me, he still had a mother, although he kept her at a distance.

  “Your father certainly buried the past,” observed Jakub. “Didn’t he ever look back?”

  Gray shook his head. “He and my mother spoke Hungarian in the house, and I knew all about her family, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, but not his.”

  “He never talked about his family,” I agreed. “The subject was off-limits, especially after the war.” Father’s parents and all three of his siblings had perished in Auschwitz. He’d kept the terrible information to himself for close to a decade, only revealing it when he learned Jakub’s family had met the same fate in Poland. Even then, he’d shared little more than the names and ages of his brother and sisters. He’d never mentioned a Hungarian wife and son. How would Father react to the news that this son had survived, assuming our poet was indeed the same person? We’d want to know for sure before we told him, but I couldn’t imagine he’d be anything less than overjoyed.

  “What are the odds?” I mused.

  “Are you asking how common a name is Zoltán Szabó?” said my husband, preparing to translate the question into French.

  “Well, yes. And I’m thinking about his age. He’d have to be a couple of years older than you,” I said, turning to Gray.

  “That would make him around forty.” My brother did the math. “So, he’d have been in his twenties during the war.”

  “That would fit, because this Zoltán Szabó knew war. It’s in the poem, don’t you agree?”

  “Je le connais,” Lázár interrupted.

  I looked at Jakub, to confirm that I’d heard correctly. Was the puppeteer saying he knew the poet personally?

  “C’est vrai?”

  “Oui, oui. Il est le copain de mon beau-frère.”

  The poem’s author, we now learned, was also an editor of The Cold Truth. He and Lázár’s brother-in-law, József, had been inmates together in one of the regime’s most notorious prisons, where they’d forged an indelible bond. József would know if this Zoltán Szabó was our relative and, what’s more, we could ask him ourselves because he spoke English. They both did. A facility with Western languages was evidently one of the things that got you branded an enemy of the state during the Rákosi era.

  “What if he turns out to be our brother?” I asked Gray as we left the apartment. “I’d like to meet him. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Very much.” He grew thoughtful. “I used to feel badly about Zoltán, as if it were my fault that Father abandoned him.”

  Jakub looked at him in disbelief. “Your fault? Please explain to me how that’s even possible.”

  “I’m not saying it makes sense, but you need to remember, I was still a kid when I found out about him. A pretty lonely kid. I’d try to imagine what he looked like, this forgotten sibling in Hungary, whether he shared my interests.” My brother paused on the landing and turned to face us. “Pure fantasy, but you know, after hearing his poem, I think we might have been friends. We chose similar paths, he and I, but mine was so much easier.”

  “Oh, Gray,” I said, moving to hug him. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “It is, isn’t it?”

  “Budapest isn’t all that far from Paris,” said Jakub. “If this man is your brother, we ought to go there and bring him out while there’s still time.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  En Route to Budapest

  October 30, 1956

  We hit the first roadblock outside Győr: a barricade constructed of fenceposts, chicken wire, sawn-off tree limbs, and bales of hay, the ramshackle structure manned by a bunch of farmers in rubber boots, some wielding hunting rifles. Next to them stood a run-down tractor draped with a Hungarian flag, the Soviet emblem torn from its center.

  “What’s this?” said Gray, bringing the Škoda to an abrupt halt that nearly sent me into the windshield. We were all in the front seat, the back given over to an assortment of luxury items impossible to procure behind the Iron Curtain: fashion magazines, perfume, tins of caviar, fancy chocolates, French cigarettes, and a bottle of champagne, along with several pairs of dungarees for Lázár’s nephew. Once we’d committed ourselves to making the journey, the puppeteer had enlisted us as emissaries in an effort to entice his sister and her family to leave Hungary by showering them with capitalist goods.

  “Maguk kicsodák? És mit akarnak?” Two of the farmers had detached themselves from the group and were approaching the car, one covering the other, his rifle pointed in our direction. The one without the rifle mimed pulling something out of his pocket. Gray reached for his wallet and handed him a ten-dollar bill in lieu of relinquishing his passport. He’d only recently had it restored by the State Department, after five years of living on the lam in England, and was understandably reluctant to lose it again. The man scrutinized the bill, eyebrows furrowed in suspicion, before taking it over to show the others, leaving his compatriot alone to guard us.

  “I hope t
hey know how to share,” my brother quipped. Fine for him to make light of the situation, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself from shaking. What were we doing, thrusting ourselves into the middle of a revolution? This wasn’t an episode in some swashbuckling adventure serial where you know the characters will survive their various trials to fight on in the sequel. We weren’t guaranteed a next scene, let alone a sequel.

  Jakub tightened his arm around me. “We’re on their side, najdroższa. Just don’t make any sudden moves and we should be okay.”

  “How do you know?” I said sharply. From the start, I’d had qualms about the expedition. The stories coming out of Hungary were so scary: reports of peaceful protesters in towns exactly like Győr being machine-gunned by Hungarian soldiers, angry mobs taking the law into their own hands and lynching local officials. I’d wanted to wait until things settled down—even Gray was getting cold feet—but Jakub had argued we were better off going right away, in case things got worse. The chaos would work in our favor. We could slip in and out without attracting attention. The authorities had more important things to worry about.

  Maybe I should have stood up to him, but once József confirmed Zoltán’s relationship to Father, everything had moved so fast. Lázár threw himself into the preparations, buying gifts, convincing the Romanian playwright to loan us his car, exploiting his Budapest connections to get us rooms in the hotel favored by Western journalists—no easy feat as the city was overrun with newsmen and photographers, all eager to cover the story. We were on our way before I knew it. A night in Zurich, staying with friends of Gray’s, a night of luxury in the Sacher Hotel in Vienna, and now here we were, not twenty miles beyond the border crossing and already in trouble.