“Believe me, he doesn’t make things easy for anyone, least of all himself.” Our companion sounded weary. “He could be so obstinate, there were times I wanted to strangle him.”
Jakub nodded his head in recognition. “Those purist types can be infuriating. You’re grateful to have them by your side in a battle, but in the day-to-day they can be very hard to live with.”
“Very hard,” agreed József. “But none of us would have survived Recsk without Zoltán, I am convinced of it. None of us. He was a genuine hero.”
We listened as he described his ordeal. Recsk was located in a mountainous region northeast of Budapest. To get there you took a train—not a passenger train, he explained, but a locked freight car you shared with fifty other men.
A freight car. The idea that the Hungarian government would have chosen this means of transporting prisoners, after the use to which freight cars had been put by the Nazis, appalled me, and I could see from the expressions on Gray’s and Jakub’s faces that it appalled them as well.
“What year was this?” asked my brother.
“1951.” József resumed his story. He and Zoltán had ended up in the same car. They were not the only ones with an education. Engineers, doctors, teachers, and civil servants were also among the ranks of prisoners, few of them suited for the relentless, backbreaking work they were assigned.
At Recsk they toiled in the summer sun and in the autumn rain, cutting down trees on the mountain slope to clear the ground for a quarry. When winter came and the mountainside was bare, they pried stones out of the frozen earth and hauled them down to the bottom on stretchers, where other prisoners broke them up with sledge hammers. The next season they were put to work building a road, to take the rocks from the quarry to the railroad station. All during this time, whether sawing wood or excavating tree stumps, while sliding in the mud on their way down the mountain with their load of stones, waiting outside the barracks for the guards to finish the evening count, or huddled in their wooden bunks at night, they talked about poetry. Zoltán, who had an excellent memory, could recite stanza after stanza of his favorite poems by heart. The authors of those poems were his true companions, and he brought them into the bleak world of Recsk to give solace to his fellow laborers, the educated and the uneducated alike.
“The men never tired of hearing him recite Dante. I believe he had memorized the better part of the Divine Comedy,” said József.
“Ah, Dante.” Gray sighed, and from some recess of his own memory he drew words I immediately recognized as the opening of the Inferno.
“Midway upon the journey of our life
“I found myself within a forest dark.
“For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”
József did a double take. “Remarkable. You’re quite like him, you know.”
“I’m certainly no hero,” my brother insisted. “Just ask Cara.”
“Well, you are pretty hard to live with,” I said, earning a laugh. But I saw Gray’s refusal to name names before McCarthy’s committee as quite heroic, and as a playwright, he didn’t take the easy way out. His portrait of Dory in “Out of Place” was harsh as only the truth can be: terrible, beautiful, lacerating in its honesty. The play wounded me, but I was glad of it. Being wounded was better than being deadened to the pain of our friend’s death. I would never forget Dory. I never wanted to.
People say good art is redemptive. I used to think they meant it was uplifting, conveying hope the way a sunrise conveys the promise of a bright new day. But bleak vistas can be redemptive too, even when there is no hope. Abandon hope, all who enter here. The dreadful inscription that Dante placed on the gates of Hell. Zoltán had brought the poet’s unflinching vision into the darkness of Recsk to remind his fellow prisoners of the terrible beautiful pain of being alive, and that may very well have been what saved them.
“Even a nightmare can be endured, if you are given the words to describe it,” I suggested. Not being gifted with language like either of my brothers, the one I knew, and the one I was beginning to know, I struggled to express my thoughts. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes,” said József. “You put it beautifully.” He looked from Gray to me. “I must say, the three of you are quite some family.”
The praise embarrassed me and I sought to shift attention back to our brother. “I still don’t understand what Zoltán did to get himself sent to Recsk. He was just a poet.”
Jakub bestowed a kiss on my forehead. “Poetry stirs the soul, najdroższa. Plato wanted to banish all the poets from his Republic.”
“So does Senator McCarthy,” said Gray. “And he’s making a damn good job of it, if you ask me.”
“But Plato was right, and your Senator McCarthy too: words are dangerous,” József pointed out. “Poets like your brother started the revolution. They published manifestos demanding freedom in the months leading up to the event and organized the protest marches on the first day. Even more importantly, they kept hope alive during the worst years of the Rákosi era. They wrote the truth, not the absurd lies the government newspapers were putting about, and somehow they found a way to get their words read. Zoltán was already writing poems in the late forties. I knew them long before I knew him.”
Gray started the engine and eased the Škoda off the curb. “Let’s see if we can find this dangerous poet-brother of ours, shall we?”
Saint Stephen’s was a long, low red brick building in the neoclassical style, part of a complex of medical clinics along Üllői út. Stately Greek columns flanked the entrance, which was crowned by a statue of Saint Stephen (we presumed) tending to the poor, sick, and elderly.
Inside the hospital, the scene was sheer chaos, wounded people everywhere you looked. Some lay on gurneys parked bumper-to-bumper in the corridors, awaiting surgery. Other more recent arrivals lay on stretchers on the floor. Nurses and orderlies in bloodstained smocks moved between them, tending to the most grievously injured.
“He could be here,” I said, scanning the faces of the wounded in a vain effort to recognize our brother’s features.
József made a dismissive noise in his throat. “He could be anywhere. All of Budapest is like this.” He’d grown hard, remote, since we’d entered the hospital, as if a glass shield had come between him and the surrounding world. This was the reality of the Hungarian revolution, the tragic counterpoint to the bravado we’d witnessed the day before in the streets. Just there in front of us, a teenaged boy lay bleeding on a gurney, the right side of his face and neck pocked by shrapnel. One eye was nearly swollen shut, but he was watching us all the same and I felt pierced by his anguished gaze. Had József’s son looked like that, when his friends brought him home? Of course, I couldn’t ask, and I certainly couldn’t blame him if shutting down was the way he coped, after everything he’d undergone.
But shutting down was not my way. I sought my husband’s hand to anchor me as we stumbled along, József guiding us ever deeper into Saint Stephen’s depths.
“Najdroższa, I’m here.” Jakub gripped my hand tightly. Maybe I was as much an anchor for him as he was for me. Poor Gray had fallen behind us and we waited for him to catch up. We were witnessing the end of the world and I was absorbing all of it. The screams of the wounded. The agony of parents struggling without success to ease their children’s pain. The hopelessness on the faces of hospital workers who could not hold back death.
Finally, we reached the office of the chief surgeon, the doctor who had operated on Zoltán. An erudite man with medical degrees from Vienna displayed on the wall behind his desk and a beard like Sigmund Freud’s, Dr. Keller insisted on brewing us tea, heating the water on a small primus stove that sat next to a metal tray of surgical instruments. As he bustled about, filling the kettle, spooning loose tea into a china pot, setting cups and saucers and a sugar bowl on the work table where he bade us sit, he apologized for the state of the hosp
ital, concerned lest “the Western visitors” think that medical care in Hungary was primitive. They were out of room and out of medical supplies, he explained with József translating. No antibiotics, no anesthetics, no morphine. Imagine operating on a fully conscious patient and not being able to give him anything for the pain. Or trying to prevent infections from spreading: a losing battle, keeping the equipment sterile amid periodic power losses. And yet, despite these circumstances, he wanted us to know, patients like our brother received the best care possible. Within an hour of having a bullet removed from his upper arm, he’d left the hospital on his own steam.
“I don’t suppose he told anyone where he was going,” said Gray.
“Knowing Zoltán, I’d imagine he went right back out to get himself shot at,” József muttered, but he dutifully relayed the question, translating the surgeon’s response as we drank our tea.
Dr. Keller assumed our brother had gone home to his wife. She was a colleague of his, Szabó Anna, a pediatrician who ran a children’s home in one of Budapest’s outlying districts. The family lived on the premises and our brother was actually better off there than in the hospital. Üllői út was the Soviets’ main route into the city, and Saint Stephen’s might well be targeted when they came back.
“He wants to know when you plan on leaving,” said József. “He’s worried that you’ll be trapped in Hungary when the Soviets come back.”
“We’ll be careful not to let that happen,” my husband told him, but this was not the answer the doctor wanted to hear. József was treated to a diatribe on the subject of Soviet barbarity, the majority of which he did not bother to translate, although what we heard was bad enough. We learned Dr. Keller had lived through the siege in World War II. In the winter of ’44, he and the few doctors who had survived the battle for Budapest were reduced to operating out of ancient caves carved into the hill beneath Buda Castle.
“He wants you to know that the Russians showed no mercy when they liberated the city,” said József. “They raped the nurses, looted the hospital, shot people in their beds. His son, Bela was taken to a work-camp, munkatábor—”
“Malenkii robot,” the surgeon asserted, vigorously nodding his head. “Beszéljen nekik erről!”
“Igen, igen. Megmondom nekik.”
I didn’t know what they were talking about, but Dr. Keller’s entire demeanor had changed. Gone was the air of authority, the calming assurance of an experienced physician that served to put patients at ease. Nobody who saw the shattered man now sitting across the table from us would have dared to put their life in his hands.
“They took his son, Bela, for forced labor. He was gone for three years,” said József, “and when he came back, he was ruined. Tönkretették.”
“Igen, tönkretették,” repeated the surgeon, tears in his eyes. “Elment az esze.”
József translated: “He has lost his mind.”
“Please tell him we’re so very sorry.” I was aware of how inadequate that sounded, but what else could any of us say? Here was a man who had spent his career repairing damaged bodies, sewing up wounds, a man devoted to healing who could not heal the one person who mattered most to him.
Jakub’s thoughts were moving in the same direction as mine. “We ought to let him get back to work,” he said, rising from the table in preparation to thanking the physician and making our goodbyes. Dr. Keller escorted us out through a back hallway. Stopping in front of a set of double doors that gave onto the clinic’s side entrance, he put a hand on Gray’s shoulder and spoke directly to my brother. “Bármennyire örülök, hogy láthattam, most mégis az volna a legjobb, ha elmenne” were his parting words. József rendered them into English: as nice as it’s been to meet you, what I’d really like you to do now is to go away.
A battered ambulance van was pulling up as we exited the building. We hurried past, anxious to be off before it disgorged its wounded passengers. We had seen enough.
Üllői út took us out of the city and through the heart of an industrial area that had endured a good deal of fighting. At times we were forced to back up the way we’d come, or to detour for several blocks as we’d done the previous day. Trolley tracks had been dug up, the metal used to reinforce the structures, the trams themselves turned on their sides and dragged over to form part of the blockade. Workers had seized control of a factory here in the early days of the uprising and they were apparently still inside, József told us, vowing to halt production until Hungary was free. We saw defiant slogans painted on the walls, but all seemed quiet that afternoon.
Pesterzsébet, the adjacent district where the children’s home was located, was less damaged and far busier. The revolutionaries were firmly in control of this suburb and it showed. People chatted on the sidewalks—the first natural-seeming behavior we’d observed since entering the country—and we were able to proceed along the main street without encountering a single sign of warfare. We passed the parish church, an imposing edifice with a tall steeple that towered above the surrounding one-story structures. The children’s home turned out to be one of these, a stuccoed building with a red tile roof set back a slight distance from the road. As Gray maneuvered the car into a parking spot out front, I watched a group of little girls playing in the walled-off courtyard attached to the property. Was one of them Zoltán’s daughter?
The afternoon had turned overcast and a light wind was blowing, scattering the leaves of a stately sycamore that occupied the center of the cleared space. Gleefully the girls lunged for the falling leaves, she who caught one before it touched the ground earning the approval of an older girl on crutches who performed the role of playground monitor. After everything we’d witnessed in the past twenty-four hours, it felt unreal to me, seeing children play, their laughter ringing in the chilly air. How quickly I’d grown accustomed to the turmoil.
József was having second thoughts about showing up unexpected at Zoltán’s front door. Although he knew where our brother lived, he’d never been invited inside the house and had only met Anna on one occasion. They were more like comrades-in-arms than friends, he said. Heroes didn’t have friends.
“Your brother might regard my turning up here with the three of you in tow as suspicious. He might even see it as threatening. In his place, I certainly would.”
“You can’t know that for sure,” said Gray. “You’re just going on a hunch.”
“One learns to trust one’s hunches, living under a dictatorship,” József replied, the shield firmly in place once more.
His words sent a chill through me. Ordinarily I was a trusting soul, and little in my experience had inclined me otherwise, but József’s stories, his very demeanor, were making me paranoid. I could not imagine living in a state of constant watchfulness, but he’d been doing it for so long it had obviously become second nature.
My husband, as usual, was several steps ahead of me. “In that case, I wonder if we should be trusting you,” he said with deceptive mildness.
József looked hard at Jakub and something passed between them. A flicker of appreciation on the Hungarian’s part, I think, as in a high-stakes chess game where one player is forced to recognize that he’d underestimated his opponent’s skill, met by an acknowledgment on the part of my husband that he too would be on his guard from that point on.
“Be that as it may,” said Gray, returning to the matter at hand, “we’re here now and you can’t ask us to turn back, after coming all this way.”
We decided I would go to the door with József. If Zoltán appeared, Gray and Jakub would join us, but we didn’t want to alarm the household by having all of us there at the outset. Nervously I pushed open the front gate and walked up the path. I so wanted it to be Zoltán himself who came to the door. I wanted him to be okay—that was the main thing—but hearing of how he had surmounted his ordeal in Recsk, I couldn’t wait to meet this extraordinary person.
“Ó csókolom!” The
girl on crutches was hobbling toward us, a bright smile on her face. József and I had reached the door and I saw him hesitating over whether he should knock or whether he should simply ask the girl if Zoltán was home, but the decision was taken out of his hands. The door was opened by a severe woman wearing a dark brown dress, a cameo brooch her only adornment. She was no taller than me, and of a slight build, her silver hair pinned up in a bun, but she gave the impression of such strength that I felt instantly intimidated.
József adopted a conciliatory tone. “Jó napot—” he began, but the woman cut him off.
“Nem,” she murmured to herself. “Ez lehetetlen!” Regarding the two of us with unalloyed hostility, she shook her head and seemed ready to retreat into the house and slam the door in our faces, but by then the girl on crutches had reached us.
“Ugye tetszik tudni ki ezek?” she said to the woman. She was still smiling as she spoke, looking from one to the other of us as if she expected to be introduced, but the woman had no intention of doing that. She shouted at the girl and shooed her away. József made a valiant attempt to engage the woman in conversation before she could shoo us away too, but she refused to be drawn out, answering his queries in a perfunctory way with her arms crossed over her chest, willing the exchange to end. She kept her voice low and I caught her glancing at the houses across the street, as if to reassure herself that no neighbors were witnessing the exchange on her doorstep.
“That has to be the most terrifying housekeeper I’ve ever met,” I commented to József, once we were back in the car. Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper played by Judith Anderson in Rebecca, came to mind. A guard dog couldn’t have been any more effective in keeping unwelcome visitors at bay.
“That wasn’t the housekeeper,” he said. “That was Anna, your brother’s wife.”
“She can’t be!” I consulted the framed photograph in my purse. Yes, the woman at the door appeared to be the same height as the woman in the picture, but she looked so much older. Seeing the contrast, I appreciated for the first time the trauma the Communist dictatorship had inflicted on Hungary’s people, not only on those like József who’d suffered directly at the hands of the regime, but on everyone who lived through the era. The years she’d spent alone while Zoltán was in prison had taken a heavy toll.
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