Burning Cold

by Lisa Lieberman

  “Amerikaiak!” The farmer had returned with his comrades from the barricade, all smiling, and motioned to the one with the rifle that he should lower his weapon. Remarkably, he also returned Gray’s money. The men seemed to be under the impression we were the advance brigade of some larger US government effort to guarantee Hungarian independence and even had we spoken their language, we wouldn’t have had the heart to tell them we were traveling without any authorization whatsoever. Not when we were being patted on the back and handed glasses of homemade fruit brandy, accompanied by toasts to President Eisenhower. An hour later, and several packs of cigarettes poorer, we bid our newfound friends farewell and tottered back to the car.

  “What did they say that stuff was? Lighter fuel?” Gray asked, fumbling in his pocket for the car keys. He wasn’t yet slurring his words, but his coordination was noticeably impaired.

  Jakub grimaced. “Pálinka. Our slivovitz is better.”

  “It would have to be, wouldn’t it?” I said. “By definition, I mean.”

  In response he ruffled my hair, boyishly short in the pixie cut I wore in those days: my Audrey Hepburn phase, Gray called it. Even the smoothest and most delicately flavored of spirits would have failed to measure up to Jakub’s very exacting standards. Early in our courtship, I overheard a conversation about vodka in the chic nightclub in Juan-les-Pins where the trio was playing. My soon-to-be-husband was extolling the virtues of some Polish brand over anything produced by the Russians. It was the first display of national pride I’d observed in him and, not being a vodka drinker myself, his vehemence surprised me. I’d since learned Jakub’s family had owned a Warsaw distillery whose herb-infused elixirs were highly prized—the first such business in Jewish hands in all of Poland. Only one uncle had survived the war to carry it on. When the Communist regime nationalized the enterprise, he’d emigrated to Israel.

  My brother was having difficulty fitting the key into the ignition. He didn’t argue when I proposed he and Jakub switch places; the Škoda was not ours, after all, which was actually a good thing. I couldn’t understand why the front doors opened backward, for one, but on top of this design flaw, the Romanian playwright hadn’t been maintaining the car. It was burning oil and required topping up each time we stopped for gas. We’d purchased a few extra cans before setting off that morning from Vienna on the final leg of the trip. With luck, we could make it to Budapest on a single tank.

  “Viszontlátásra!” Gray called out the window as we negotiated our way around the barricade.

  “What did you say?”

  “Huh? What do you mean, what did I say? I said goodbye, Cara.”

  “Not in English, you didn’t.” He was tipsier than I thought. Good thing Jakub was driving. Who knew what sort of trouble we’d encounter next? I still wished we hadn’t come, but I trusted my husband to keep a cool head in a crisis.

  Sure enough, a few miles after leaving the farmers, we found ourselves overtaking a convoy of Soviet tanks and armored cars that had halted by the side of the two-lane highway. They paid us scant attention, but it was nerve-racking all the same. A bicyclist approaching from the opposite direction headed straight across the fields at the sight of the heavy vehicles. The best we could do was to cross our fingers and hope some trigger-happy gunner didn’t get it into his head to shoot at us just for kicks. We all heaved a sigh of relief when we had the road to ourselves again.

  Budapest was a battlefield. Everywhere you looked, you saw the toll of the fighting. The streets and sidewalks were stained with blood. Bodies lay where they’d fallen, Russian soldiers in their greatcoats and fur hats, bare-headed freedom fighters, old women dead on the pavement but still grasping their string shopping bags, caught in the crossfire as they waited in line to buy bread. I didn’t want to look, but it would have been cowardly to avert my gaze. The news reports we’d watched on television, the photos that had begun to appear in the daily papers, had hardly prepared us for the horror we were witnessing in the Hungarian capital. Here were people like us, some who were simply going about their business, others who were following orders, but many who believed so strongly in freedom they’d risked their lives in the effort to obtain it. In death they looked ordinary, diminished, but they’d been brave to dream of a better future. Ordinary people made heroic by the sacrifice they were prepared to make: the least I could do was to acknowledge their courage.

  Jakub brought me back to the here and now. “Najdroższa, can you figure out where we are?”

  We’d purchased a map of Hungary in Paris before we left. One side showed the country, the other featured insets of its major cities. Lázár had marked the location of our hotel on the inset of Budapest. The Duna was located on the right bank of the Danube (“Duna” was the Hungarian name for the river) just south of the Chain Bridge, a major landmark that was impossible to miss, he’d assured us. But we couldn’t get there. Crossing over from Buda to Pest further north, on the Margaret Bridge, we’d found our way blocked by an upended tram, leaving us no choice but to enter the labyrinth of narrow streets and alleyways that crisscrossed through the commercial district, each turn taking us farther away from the river. Time and time again we’d been forced to go back the way we’d come, weaving around the destroyed armored cars and artillery pieces left helter-skelter in the road while keeping clear of unexploded mortar shells as we searched for a street that was still passable. But at last we’d reached the junction of two major arteries, Andrássy út and Bajcsy-Zsilinszky út, which I was able to locate on the map, thankfully.

  “You’ll want to turn left up ahead, onto Attila József út. It’s a straight run to the hotel.” The way looked clear and I was beginning to relax, confident we would reach our destination, but no sooner had we come to the next intersection than we were met by a crowd of student insurgents, all armed to the teeth. They motioned with their machine guns for Jakub to roll down the window of the Škoda and asked for identification, but their belligerence vanished the minute they realized we were Americans. In exchange for a box of fancy chocolates, we were given a prize souvenir: a chunk of metal from the gargantuan Stalin statue they’d toppled on the first day of the uprising. A gift from the Soviet leader to the Hungarian people on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, it had stood for years at the entrance to Budapest’s City Park. Now all that remained were Stalin’s boots.

  One of the girls, Kati, who spoke a little English, volunteered to ride with us the rest of the way as our escort. She installed herself in a space we cleared for her in the back seat and aimed her machine gun out the window, prepared to shoot any Russian soldiers or renegade secret policemen we might encounter along the way. ÁVH headquarters was situated farther down the block, she explained; the revolutionaries had commandeered it and were in the process of liberating the files housed inside. At any moment, the authorities might try to retake it. That’s why she and her fellow freedom fighters were on edge. Wearing a school uniform beneath her wool jacket, an ammunition belt slung across her chest, and a beret perched jauntily on her blond curls, she made an unlikely guerilla. At her age I was swooning over movie stars and memorizing the lyrics to popular songs.

  Our guide clearly had more important things on her mind. “Look there!” she’d cried as we detoured around the wreckage at Deák tér. Jakub stopped in the intersection on her instructions, to give us a better view of the action. We saw a tank proceeding slowly along Tanács körút. The next thing we knew, the tank had come to a standstill and two boys were darting out from the shelter of a newspaper kiosk, unobserved by the Russian soldiers in the turret. We saw the first one approach—Kati provided a running commentary, telling us exactly what he was doing as he unscrewed the cap to the gas tank and dashed back to his hiding place—and then the second heaved a Molotov cocktail at the open port.

  “Christ! The bloody thing’s going to blow up!” Gray exclaimed. “Go, man. Go!”

  Jakub floored it and managed to get us bey
ond the square and out of range of flying debris in a matter of seconds. We felt the blast at the same time we heard it, the paving stones vibrating beneath our tires with the force of the explosion. The sound was deafening, the boom reverberating off the surrounding buildings as if we were in some kind of echo chamber. I hugged myself and closed my eyes. Was this how I would die, far from home in a sudden explosion?

  Gray had trained as a soldier in World War II (although he’d never seen action), and Jakub had his wartime experiences in the French underground, but the closest I’d ever come to a battle was seeing the bombed-out ruins of Italian towns and cities when I was in Sicily for a film shoot the year before. Imagining how the ruins got that way was nothing like witnessing the destruction as it was happening. And yet a strange calm had come over me. Death was arbitrary, and if it came now, there was nothing Jakub, Gray, or I could do to stop it. Why had I assumed that it would mean something? I realized in that moment that the way you lived your life mattered more than the way you died. If we survived this, I thought to myself, I would make every moment count.

  My ears were ringing, but I gradually became aware the others were talking about the boys. Could anyone or anything come through a detonation like that unscathed, my brother was asking. Kati assured him that her comrades had allowed themselves plenty of time to take cover; she herself had participated in numerous practice raids with homemade bombs. In school they’d been trained to resist the imperialists by such improvised means, she bragged, and the risk of blowing oneself up was not as great as it appeared.

  “The imperialists?” I repeated stupidly.

  “She means us,” said Gray. “Isn’t that right, sweetheart?”

  Kati nodded enthusiastically. In a sing-song, she recited a chant in Hungarian, an imaginative little ditty about Stalin getting Uncle Sam in a headlock, or so I gathered from her loose translation. They’d been encouraged to chant it while performing calisthenics at Communist Party youth rallies, competing to see who could do the most exercises without flagging.

  “Anything to keep up morale,” my brother commented, taking refuge in his habitual cynicism.

  Jakub shifted into a lower gear, his face impassive. He was only eighteen when he’d joined the Communist Youth, a decision born less out of conviction than of necessity. A Jewish foreigner studying music in Paris, he’d had no choice but to go underground once the Germans occupied the city and started rounding up “aliens,” helped along by French gendarmes, and shipping them off to the camps in cattle cars. Sometimes I worried that I could never surmount the gap between his life and mine.

  A bit farther along, Kati pointed to the mutilated body of a secret police agent dangling from a tree. He’d gotten no better than he deserved, she informed us self-righteously. On top of everything else we would witness during our time in Hungary, the sangfroid of our schoolgirl escort haunts me to this very day.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Hotel Duna, Budapest

  October 31, 1956

  József met us at the Duna the next morning and we drove him to the magazine’s offices to meet our brother. “Offices” is probably too dignified a word for the tiny third-floor apartment off Republic Square, a scrubby park in a working-class district of Budapest, where he and our brother produced The Cold Truth. I’d been expecting a hive of literary activity, bearded poets hunched over their typewriters in the throes of inspiration, crafting odes to their courageous brothers on the barricades. Being an actress, I tend to have an overactive imagination.

  The cold truth, to borrow the expression, couldn’t have been further from my romantic vision. The room was cold, for sure. All the windows were blown out, shards of glass blasted across the floor, which was also littered with shell casings. Copies of the mimeographed magazine were scattered everywhere. We couldn’t help treading on them when we came in the door, which we’d found ajar. Bullet holes punctured the ceiling as if someone, or several someones, had been firing into the room from the sidewalk below. A daybed was pushed against a wall, the one farthest from the broken windows, its rumpled coverlet splattered with blood.

  “Good lord!” József exclaimed. “The place was intact yesterday. All of this happened after your brother and I left.” A dapper, middle-aged man in tweeds, he had the fastidiousness of Noel Coward without the leavening touch of a sense of humor. Not that the scene before us called for humor.

  We surveyed the room, the dingy kitchenette in the corner, its sink stacked high with cups and plates. The bookshelves laden with leather-bound tomes, most by Hungarian authors I’d never heard of, although I glimpsed the names of a few Western authors among them. Four desks occupied the center of the space, each boasting an old-fashioned typewriter, the kind with glass-topped keys. Stuck between the rollers of one of the typewriters was a sheet of paper with a dozen or so words typed in Hungarian that petered out mid-sentence, followed by a sequence of Roman numerals. I noticed a blood-smeared fingerprint on the upper right-hand corner of the page.

  József noticed too. Carefully, he unrolled the sheet of paper from the cylinder far enough to allow him to read the typewritten line.

  “Damned warrior ethic,” he muttered. “Why couldn’t he have kept his head down?”

  We all stared at him in dismay. He was talking about Zoltán.

  “But you just told us that the two of you left together,” said Jakub.

  “He must have come back.”

  “How can you be sure it was him?” I objected. “Anyone could have come in. The door was wide open.”

  “This is his desk.” József sank into the chair. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, “but I lived with your brother for three years. He had a bad habit of biting his nails when he was preoccupied.” A scattering of fingernail parings littered the floor by his feet. I’d taken them to be splinters of glass.

  Gray asked about the words on the sheet of paper in the typewriter. Had Zoltán left a message for us?

  “I’m afraid not. Offhand, I’d say it was a line of poetry he was composing. Something to do with frozen tears.”

  Our companion now set about opening the desk drawers and removing their contents, laying them out on a corner of the desk that he’d cleared expressly for the purpose. In this way he discovered the item that brought Zoltán to life for me: a small framed black-and-white photograph of a man, a woman, and a small girl, the three of them dressed for a summer outing. Sunlight dappled their faces, which were already bright with smiles. The girl couldn’t have been older than three or four. Her black hair was plaited in two tight braids and she was wearing brand-new Mary Janes and a plaid dress with a bow at the collar that matched the bows at the ends of her braids. The man was in shirtsleeves but carried a seersucker jacket draped over one shoulder. He had a high forehead and thinning hair brushed back, away from his face. Round tortoiseshell glasses gave him an owlish, intellectual look, but I was most struck by the man’s light eyes. They were the same as Father’s.

  “That’s your brother,” József confirmed. “His wife’s name is Anna. She’s a physician. The daughter’s name escapes me at the moment.”

  Gray studied the photo, then handed it to me. “He doesn’t look much like either of us, does he?” We’d both inherited the dark coloring of our respective mothers. While my brother’s complexion was swarthier than mine—his mother claimed to be part Gypsy—we bore enough of a resemblance to make it evident we were siblings. The man in the photograph looked a great deal like Father, apart from the thinning hair. Father, at sixty-four, still had a full head of hair. It was now entirely white, but I remembered when it was brown, a lighter shade than either Gray’s or mine. Again, more like Zoltán’s, as I noted.

  “He has your smile,” said Jakub, who’d been peering at the photograph over my shoulder. I examined our half brother’s face, looking past the smile in an effort to discern the man underneath. He looked as if married life agreed with him, which made me glad.
And he was obviously adored by the child, who was smiling up at her father, not focused straight ahead at the photographer or looking at her mother, a slender, fair-haired woman who stood rather awkwardly at the edge of the composition. She wore a white linen dress, quite simple, its timeless elegance reminding me of lawn parties at Walden Lodge in the days when my mother presided, people playing badminton or croquet while waiters in white jackets proffered glasses of rum punch and the strains of a rumba drifted across from the terrace. Zoltán’s wife would have fit right in at one of those gatherings. How strange to discover I had a sister-in-law as well as a niece.

  “I’d like to keep this,” I said, placing the framed photograph in my handbag. If we found Zoltán, I could always give it back to him, but if we didn’t, I wanted Father to know that his son had grown into manhood, that he’d been brave and talented, but above all, that he’d been happy.

  “Home so soon, dearies?” Peter Ames hailed us as we exited the revolving door and entered the hotel lobby. We’d dropped József off at his apartment on the way back to the Duna. He intended to make a few inquiries—a euphemism, we suspected, for a visit to the morgue—and would rejoin us later. We were all in low spirits, fearing the worst, but we had no intention of confiding our fears in Ames.

  Gray took my arm, propelling me onward, toward the reception desk. “Keep walking,” he instructed, sotto voce. “Maybe we can outpace him.” He’d taken an instant dislike to the British journalist, who’d foisted himself upon us at dinner the night before; he and Gray had several acquaintances in common back in London and Ames had wasted no time in exploiting these connections.

  “Outpace him? You must be kidding,” said Jakub. We’d reached the desk, but Ames was closing in, moving more rapidly than you’d expect a man of his size to be capable of navigating the crowded lobby. Smaller, thinner men scurried out of his way as he surged ahead, holding aloft a highball glass as if it were a torch.