Burning Cold

by Lisa Lieberman

  My husband was strangely fascinated by Ames. Jakub’s knowledge of England derived exclusively from literature: Shakespeare, first and foremost. Milton, Pope, Spenser, Dryden, a solid grounding in Dickens, along with a smattering of the Romantic poets—his English teacher at the gymnasium he attended in Warsaw had been enamored of the classics—but Gissing’s New Grub Street must have come his way at some point. He saw Ames as a true English type. The Fleet Street hack, willing to go to any lengths to get a scoop.

  “He’s a type, all right,” said Gray. “The type you avoid like the plague.”

  The journalist did seem overly eager to assist us in locating our missing relative, jotting down the details of Zoltán’s story (which he’d extracted expertly, I will admit) in his little black notebook, to pursue along with his own investigations. Gray worried we’d end up a feature article in the trashy tabloid Ames reported for, but he was a veritable fount of information regarding the revolutionary events of the previous week. Dozens of Western reporters had made their way into the country since the uprising began. Ames had ingratiated himself with every last one of them, as far as we could tell, and was only too happy to pass on whatever he heard, a conduit for all manner of rumors and wild predictions. Alas, not speaking a word of Hungarian, we had no more reliable source of news.

  The desk clerk had our room keys in hand before we even asked. “Any messages?” Gray inquired. Zoltán knew where we were staying. Perhaps he’d tried to get in touch.

  “I am sorry, Mr. Walden.” The clerk’s face bore a look of genuine regret, remorse encompassing not only his answer to my brother’s question, but the decrepitude of the establishment where he was employed.

  The Duna had definitely seen better days. The furniture in the lobby was shabby, the marble floor tiles cracked, the velvet drapes frayed and faded. Magnificent crystal chandeliers still hung in the dining room, their glass tinkling with every loud disturbance on the street, but they gave no light, most of the bulbs having burned out decades earlier. The whole place was sadly in need of refurbishment. Nevertheless, the staff carried on as if the hotel were still the top-notch establishment it must have been in Father’s time. Indeed, the Walden name was known to them. Father’s reputation as a director of high-class Hollywood costume dramas made his countrymen proud, even if the cultural arbiters of the recently overthrown regime had condemned his work as decadent capitalist rubbish.

  Ames materialized beside us at the reception desk, slightly out of breath. He knocked back the remainder of his pink gin and set the empty glass down on the counter, ignoring the clerk’s disapproving glare. The revolutionaries had forbidden the sale of alcohol, a gesture of mourning for the martyrs who’d died in the early days of the uprising. Other guests had the decency to confine their drinking to the privacy of their rooms; it was not at all difficult to procure liquor if one went about it discreetly. But Ames traveled with his own supply of Beefeaters and bitters and saw no reason to go without his favorite cocktail—a favorite of the Royal Navy too, Gray noted, quaffed in imperial outposts the world over.

  “Did you find your brother?”

  For some reason, the job of answering this question fell to me, but as I began to describe the condition of the magazine’s offices, I couldn’t help getting upset. What had begun more or less on a whim, the quest to find our mysterious brother in Hungary, had become serious all of a sudden. Deadly serious. Zoltán was no longer an abstraction. He had brown hair and poor eyesight. He bit his fingernails. He found time to write poetry while shooting down at unknown assailants in the street below. Most importantly, he had a wife and child who loved him. I hoped he had found his way safely back to them, but I was worried he hadn’t. Why else had he failed to show up to meet us this morning as planned? If he was still alive, wouldn’t he have gotten word to József and spared us the ordeal of the office?

  Ames patted my shoulder in an avuncular fashion. “Chin up,” he said. “I took the liberty of booking a table for lunch. There’s no better restaurant in this part of the city. Go and powder your nose, dearie. I’ll be waiting for you in the dining room.”

  Gray said he would rather starve as we headed to the elevator, but there was really no alternative to eating in the hotel. József would be reporting back with the results of his inquiries and we didn’t want to miss him. Besides, where would we go?

  Entering the dining room was like stepping into another era, pre-revolution and pre-Communist. Seated around us were well-dressed citizens, tucking into their goulash as if they hadn’t a care in the world. How could this be? The damage was everywhere you looked. So many stores had been destroyed in the fighting that food was in short supply. Yet here we were, being served rolls with fresh butter by a servile French-speaking waiter with the delightfully inapt name of Attila who apologized for being out of caviar, but recommended the morel bisque as a first course. Or perhaps we would prefer the goose liver paté on toast points?

  Jakub’s voice betrayed his incredulity as he transmitted the waiter’s recommendations. “Where are you getting such delicacies at a time like this?” I heard him ask.

  Attila explained that Hungary’s farmers had taken it upon themselves to provision the city. Wagons full of produce, dairy, pork, and poultry had started to arrive from the countryside, now that the fighting was tapering off and order was being restored. Just this morning a peasant had appeared at the service entrance to the hotel with several freshly killed geese. Hadn’t we heard? The Russians were going home and a new government was preparing to rule the country democratically.

  “Soon we be like America,” Attila said in English, beaming at Gray and me. “Your dear father, he come back. Make beautiful movies for his country.”

  “Is it true, what he said?” Gray asked Ames when the waiter had left, unable to repress his curiosity despite his aversion to the man. “Are the Soviets pulling out?”

  The British journalist buttered a roll and popped a piece into his mouth. “Never trust the Russkies,” he said, chewing. “Khrushchev’s a sly dog. Not as evil as Stalin, mind you, but he didn’t get to be party leader playing by the rules.”

  I was sitting with my back to the door. Jakub, who had a better view of the comings and goings in the dining room, had risen from the table in the middle of Ames’s little speech. Turning in my seat, I saw him conversing with József at the maître d’s stand. They spoke for several minutes. Attila had ample time to set another place before they joined us. What was József telling him? It couldn’t have been good news, or they’d have announced it when they sat down, but if our brother were dead, I would have been able to tell from my husband’s face.

  Ames was intrigued by our Hungarian acquaintance. He opened his notebook and, pencil poised, began peppering him with questions. “Where did you learn to speak proper English? Oxbridge, I’d wager. The tweeds are a dead giveaway. Fond of Britain, are you?”

  József acknowledged he had spent several years studying law at Cambridge in the 1930s. During World War II he was employed by the Foreign Office and might have stayed on in some capacity. Indeed, he sorely regretted his decision to return to Hungary in 1945, but at the time he’d felt duty-bound to serve his country in her time of need.

  “We had hopes of turning our nation into a democracy. There were free elections—the first truly free elections in our history—and liberalism triumphed. The people voted for a parliamentary government with private property and a market economy, just like you have in England.”

  Ames nodded. “A laudable objective. But your country lacks our tradition of self-governance.”

  “Quite so.” A pained look came into József’s eyes and he paused to massage his temples. “I’m afraid we were terribly naive.”

  Lázár had given us a lesson on recent Hungarian history before we left Paris, but I hadn’t grasped what it meant to live through the Communist takeover until now. József had belonged to the Social Democratic Party in t
he immediate postwar era, and had sat in the National Assembly until the Communists seized power in 1947. Not long afterward, he was arrested, tortured, and forced to confess to a list of trumped-up charges, then sentenced to three years in Recsk, the most brutal penal camp in all of Hungary.

  “Tortured!” I could hardly believe this refined man sitting across the lunch table had endured such punishment at the hands of his own government. I knew such things went on. The French army was torturing Algerians whom they suspected of being terrorists. It was in the news every day, sickening accounts of beatings, rapes, and electric shocks. Not long after our arrival in Paris, Jakub and I had attended a ceremony at the famous Mur des Fédérés in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Former members of the Resistance who had themselves been tortured by the Gestapo stood up and spoke against the atrocities being carried out in Algeria by the French army. “We are doing there what the Germans did here,” one of them said. The accusation had stuck with me.

  József flexed his fingers and brought his palms to rest on the tablecloth. He’d been wearing gloves earlier, and had kept them on in the apartment because of the cold. Now I saw the backs of both hands were marked with the pinkish scar tissue that grows back over severe burns and several of his fingernails were missing.

  “What they did to you—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. He must have endured multiple sessions at the hands of the secret police. Yet here he sat in the Duna dining room, helping himself to another roll from the basket, asking Ames to pass the butter. That’s what shocked me, as I thought about it, his ability to behave like an ordinary man after the cruelty that had been done to him. Why wasn’t he enraged? I felt enraged on his behalf, and I was glad of it, glad I lived in a place where people spoke out against torture. The French had an image of themselves as a just and humane people, and I’d seen them struggling to uphold that self-image in the face of the brutality of the Algerian campaign. Here in Hungary, the struggle had barely begun.

  Attila arrived with platters of chicken paprikas and dumplings and placed them before us with a flourish. The national dish, it deserved to be accompanied by a creamy Cabernet Sauvignon, he told us. They produced a fine variety in the Eger region, but since he was not permitted to serve wine, he let us know he would be bringing us coffee instead.

  “Coffee with the main course?” said Ames. “Please don’t tell me that you indulge in that nasty American habit. On ne boit pas de café avec le dîner,” he informed Attila with a dismissive flick of the wrist, exactly as a French person would have done.

  “Is special coffee,” the waiter assured him with a wink. “You will like.” Once he had seen to it that everyone was served, he brought out a silver coffeepot and proceeded to pour each of us a cup of the special coffee, which rivaled the very best of the French Cabernets I’d sampled with Jakub. Looking around the dining room, I saw that many of the patrons were having coffee with their meals. Ames consumed a full pot, all by himself, and even József asked for a refill. By his third cup, he’d loosened up to the point where he was willing to divulge a good many things that outsiders couldn’t possibly have known about the Rákosi era.

  “Do tell,” said Ames, licking the tip of his pencil as he prepared to take notes. “I’m all ears.”

  József put a finger to his lips and gestured for all of us to lean in. The Duna, he whispered, which catered to foreigners, was bugged, a listening post in the basement staffed with ÁVH agents around the clock.

  The journalist’s jaw dropped. “Is this true?” he demanded of Attila, who had returned to our table with dessert menus and was just then in the process of removing our empty plates.

  “Is which true, sir?”

  “Is the hotel bugged?”

  Taken aback, the waiter denied the allegation vigorously. “No bug. Is very clean, sir.”

  “Bug: ça veut dire dispositif d’écoute,” the journalist clarified, employing what I could only assume to be the French term for a listening device. His command of the language was impressive.

  “Mais oui, monsieur. Bien sûr,” Attila agreed. “Yes, sir. Is bug.” Picking up the final plate, he gave a curt bow before marching smartly back to the kitchen. The rest of us looked at one another, unsure what to make of this matter-of-fact confirmation, leaving open as it did the question of whether the bugs were still being monitored.

  Ames proposed continuing the conversation outside. “No point in broadcasting, if you catch my meaning.”

  “I’m afraid we must be on our way,” said József, glancing at his watch. “We have an appointment with the chief surgeon at Saint Stephen’s.” After leaving us, he hadn’t gone to the morgue, he’d gone home to phone various hospitals on the off chance our brother had ended up in one of them. His diligence was rewarded: someone fitting Zoltán’s description had been treated at Saint Stephen’s for a gunshot wound the previous night.

  “Thank goodness!” I could have hugged József. Gray was beaming, and Ames reached across the table to shake his hand, but Jakub held back. He and József exchanged a look. They clearly knew something else that we didn’t. Had our brother died on the operating table? I couldn’t bring myself to ask, and neither could Gray, although I could see from his face the same thought had occurred to him.

  “Best to be out with it,” urged Ames. “Did he come through the surgery or not?”

  “He came through it fine, as far as we know,” said József in a tone that failed to reassure me. “But they seem to have lost him.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Gray called for the check and signed for the meal, waving aside Ames’s ineffectual offer to pay his portion of the bill. The three of us then went upstairs to retrieve our winter coats and hats, along with the champagne, caviar, and whatnot for József’s family, which we’d left in Gray’s room overnight. Ames trailed along as we ferried it down the block, but when we reached the Škoda he could see for himself there wasn’t enough room for five in the Romanian playwright’s car, not when one of them was a man of his girth. We stowed the gifts in the trunk and got in, eager to be gone, but the journalist held up a hand as we pulled away from the curb, motioning for József to roll down his window.

  “I’ll be waiting for your return, dearies. Do be careful …”

  Whatever else he’d intended to say was drowned out by the clatter of a Soviet half-track, its metal treads making a fearful noise as it barreled toward us. Gray put the car in neutral, let out the clutch, shifted into second gear, and stepped on the accelerator. I was sitting next to Jakub in the back seat and I saw him brace himself for the inevitable jerk, but the car moved smoothly forward, picking up speed, and we’d soon outpaced the military machine.

  “That’s some trick!” said my husband, the daredevil in him thrilled by the stunt. Poor József, meanwhile, was gripping the door handle, his body tensed as if preparing to spring from the moving vehicle at any moment.

  “My brother’s seen a few too many gangster movies,” I said. “He’s imagining himself at the wheel of a getaway car. Notice the fedora? He never goes anywhere without it.”

  József tittered artificially without relaxing his grip on the handle. “A tough guy, are you? A ladies’ man? I suppose they like that sort of thing.”

  “Hardly,” demurred Gray. Movie-star handsome, with his shock of dark hair and the dapper little goatee he’d affected in England, it would be more accurate to say he was a gentleman’s man—not that he advertised his sexual proclivities. Being blacklisted was trouble enough.

  But where were all the tanks going? As we approached the green-painted iron span of Liberty Bridge, we saw a column of them crossing the Danube. The noise they made rendered conversation impossible. Gray was forced to drive up onto the sidewalk and park to get out of their way as one tank after another rumbled past us.

  “They must really be leaving,” Jakub shouted over the din, drawing our attention to the silent groups of bystanders
on the opposite sidewalk. Hungarians would not have been watching so dispassionately the day before. Those not running for cover would very likely have been launching an ambush, as the boys we’d seen the previous day had done.

  The last tank rolled across the bridge and Gray made to pull back out onto the road, but József asked him to wait. “This is a good place to talk,” he said, offering around a pack of unfiltered Hungarian cigarettes. Jakub accepted one out of politeness, but Gray and I stuck to our own brands, Player’s and Lucky Strikes, respectively. We all sat smoking in the closed car while József gathered his thoughts.

  I found it soothing inside the Škoda, its cream-colored interior contrasting nicely with the vermillion of the body. Swank it was not; in addition to burning oil, there were dents in the hood, and the upholstery gave off a curious licorice aroma, but it nevertheless felt like home. I was content to settle back with my cigarette and look at the view across the Danube. One of Budapest’s grand hotels, the Gellért, was directly across the bridge. A massive building, imposing even when viewed from the opposite bank of the river, it too had fallen into disrepair. Decaying buildings could be found in our Paris neighborhood, but these had the charm of sepia photographs, their edges blurred and softened with time. You could still make out the beauty of the original image. By contrast, Budapest’s former elegance had been deliberately effaced, as if to prevent the city’s residents from indulging in nostalgia for its bygone splendor. I felt sorry for them, going about in the dimmed landscape.

  József stubbed out his cigarette in the car’s ashtray. “I would like to tell you about your brother, before you meet him.”

  “Assuming we do meet him,” said Gray. “He isn’t making it easy for us.”