Burning Cold

by Lisa Lieberman

  József was giving a synopsis of our encounter to Jakub and Gray. “She refused to answer any questions about your brother. I have no idea when she last saw him, or whether they’re still married, for that matter, but I’ll tell you this: the poor creature is scared to death.” He felt badly for having added to her worries, particularly as it was all to no avail. We were no closer to finding Zoltán.

  Privately, I disagreed. I couldn’t explain why, but I had the impression the girl knew exactly who I was and why I’d come. She’d sought my eyes as she turned to go back to her charges. Please, I sensed her silent plea. Find him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Gypsy band in the Duna bar struck up a tango, of all things, and the next instant Jakub and I were dancing cheek to cheek, his hand exerting the lightest pressure in the middle of my back, enough to signal when it was time to pivot before resuming our sinuous walk around the floor. A slight bend of the knee, a sideways swivel, and Jakub turned me around in a languorous circle, my right foot trailing behind until I lifted it, at his prompting, into a perfectly executed leg wrap.

  “Brava, najdroższa.”

  I leaned into him and nibbled his earlobe. Never once during the obligatory ballroom dancing lessons at the Wentworth Academy for Young Ladies had I grasped the essential feature of the tango, the melting movement where two become one, but improvising figures to the driving rhythm of the guitar, violin, and accordion in the arms of my beloved was already second nature. The minor chords matched my mood, too—far better than the jaunty folk melodies with which the set had begun.

  “You probably need to be Magyar to appreciate them,” Gray had said, already in his cups. To celebrate the dissolution of the old Hungarian Communist Party and the formation of a new government not beholden to the Soviet Union, the hotel had opened its ample cellars. To hell with revolutionary pronouncements! Champagne flowed freely, along with a variety of regional wines and a very fine pálinka that even Jakub was forced to admit gave his cherished slivovitz a run for its money. But none of us was in festive spirits that evening; we could not share the optimism of the people around us.

  On the return trip, József relayed the substance of Dr. Keller’s diatribe as Gray drove us back into the ruined city. The surgeon had ties to the provisional government that now controlled Hungary. He’d treated the new minister of the press, Géza Losonczy, after his release from prison and continued to monitor his health. The poor man had emerged from his time in captivity in dire shape and would never recover fully.

  “He advised Losonczy against accepting the post,” said József, “but Losonczy told him it didn’t matter.”

  Jakub, as usual, was quick on the uptake. “He figured he’d die either way.” He grew thoughtful. “Dr. Keller heard something from Losonczy, didn’t he? Some news that the government knows and is not telling the people.”

  “There are reports of Soviet forces amassing on the borders.”

  “But we saw the tanks leaving!” I protested.

  József shook his head. “All for show. Poland and Czechoslovakia are watching what happens here. Do you think Khrushchev is going to stand by and allow the satellites to slip away, one by one? The Russians are biding their time, and when the moment is right, they’ll be back to put the rebellion down. Decisively.”

  “America won’t let that happen,” insisted Gray. I was sitting directly behind him and was unable to see his profile, but from the tense set of his shoulders, I could tell he was growing angry. “I mean, Christ. The Republicans have been obsessing about Communism for years, for decades, and here’s a country trying to get free of it. We’ll intervene. We’ve got to. Eisenhower’s a general. He’ll know how to stop those bastards.”

  “Eisenhower’s attention is elsewhere at the moment, I’m afraid,” said our companion.

  “Are you talking about the Israeli attack?” Gray asked. “That was bound to happen sooner or later, after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. But I read in the papers in Vienna yesterday that the French and British sent ultimatums to both sides, demanding a ceasefire.”

  “The French and the British are bombing Egypt as we speak.”

  My brother swerved to avoid a chunk of masonry, a cornice from one of the blasted buildings that lined the wide avenue. “You can’t be serious,” he said when he’d straightened us out.

  “I wish I weren’t.”

  Now it was Jakub’s turn to be alarmed. “What about the Soviets? They’re Nassar’s ally.”

  “There’s been mention of nuclear weapons.” József’s voice was grim.

  I gasped. “The bomb!” In a heartbeat, we’d gone from talk of the revolution in Hungary to the skirmish in Egypt to the threat of thermonuclear war.

  “The president isn’t about to risk a nuclear war over the Suez Canal,” my brother hastened to assure me. “Certainly not a week before the election.”

  I wanted to believe him, but it felt as if we were on the brink of disaster. The world could end in a flash. We all knew it, and yet most people acted as if the danger wasn’t real. I’ll admit I could put it out of my mind for days at a time, but the fear was always there, hovering darkly around the edges of my awareness. Bertrand Russell predicted universal death if we could not forget our quarrels; Gray and I heard him say it on the BBC. All it would take was a serious confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, he’d warned, and now here we were, facing two serious confrontations in the space of a single week.

  “The British and French couldn’t have chosen a worse time to launch an invasion,” said my husband. “You’re truly lost, aren’t you?”

  In response, József slapped his palm against the dashboard. “Listen to me. We’ve got to get your brother out of here. He won’t stand a chance, once the Soviets return. They’ll go after people like him straightaway.”

  “But we haven’t a clue where he is,” said Gray. “His own wife doesn’t even know.”

  “Or if she does know, she isn’t telling,” I added.

  “One of the other poets might be harboring him. I’ll phone around this evening.” József paused to think. “Your father must be an American citizen by now.”

  My brother confirmed this. “A naturalized citizen, yes. Has been for years.”

  “Is that going to get Zoltán in trouble?” I worried, wondering what was behind the question.

  “No,” said József, brightening and taking charge. “That’s what’s going to get him out of trouble.” He was more animated than we’d ever seen him, with a hint of a drill sergeant about him. “Pay attention, now. Here’s what you’re going to do. Tomorrow morning you will go to the American embassy and apply for a visa. As the son of an American citizen, Zoltán is entitled to one and it’s his best chance of getting out of the country after you leave. If he shows up at the border with an American visa, they’ll have to let him through.”

  “How long before the Soviets come back?” Jakub asked. “Days or weeks?”

  “Days, according to Dr. Keller.”

  We arranged to meet at the Duna at eleven the next morning. József had circled the location of the embassy on our map. It was only a short walk from the hotel and he’d advised us to go on foot, owing to the severity of the damage along the way. Indeed, it took time getting back after we dropped him off, although his apartment was less than a mile away. Structural damage inflicted during the days of heavy shelling was causing buildings to collapse, and we saw residents with handcarts picking through the rubble, salvaging what they could from their former homes.

  “They’re awfully stoic, aren’t they?” observed Jakub, but to me they looked stunned, going mechanically about their task as if at a loss for something to do. Watching them collect their possessions, I remembered the gifts in the trunk and was ashamed. Champagne, chocolates, caviar: what in the world were we thinking? We should have brought a carload of medical supplies instead. Useful
items like flour, dried beans, and blankets.

  Gray had maneuvered the Škoda into a parking spot in front of the Duna and made straight for the bar. He was eager to chat up some of the foreign correspondents and hear what their governments were saying about the Suez Crisis. We’d found Ames presiding over a table of inebriated journalists of various nationalities. Blearily, they’d made room for us, and my brother had wasted no time in catching up on the news—along with the drinking, alas. Well before Jakub and I stepped out on the dance floor, he’d reached the point of no return. I seriously doubted he was learning anything of value, but there, as it turned out, I was mistaken.

  The tango number was succeeded by a bossa nova that somehow devolved into a conga line, from which Jakub and I had difficulty extricating ourselves. Snaking past the journalists’ table, I’d noticed my brother engaged in a tête-à-tête with a man I’d never seen before, a tall fellow with Brylcreemed hair and the physique of a body builder. Gray was attracted to muscular guys and this one was exactly his type, Brylcreem aside. They were still talking intimately when I sat back down. Jakub had gone off to get us two glasses of water. With all the chatter from the many conversations being conducted in half a dozen languages around the table, it took me a minute to realize the two of them were conversing in Hungarian.

  “What in the world?” I blurted out.

  Gray took note of my presence for the first time. “Cara,” he said. At least I recognized my name. The rest of the sentence rushed by, incomprehensible to me but not, apparently, to his good-looking pal, who interrupted to add some gloss of his own, eliciting an even longer response from Gray. All in fluent Hungarian.

  I felt as if I were watching a dubbed film. Two summers earlier I’d had a part in a B movie shot in Sicily by an Italian director and featuring an international cast. It had been strange at the London premiere, seeing my lips form English phrases as the dialogue came out of my mouth in Italian. Only Gray’s lips were moving in sync with his dialogue.

  “Would you mind saying that again, in English?” Honestly, I half expected the words to fall out of my own mouth in a foreign tongue (was it something to do with the pálinka?) but, no, I was most assuredly speaking English.

  Gray’s companion was instantly apologetic. “Please excuse me, mademoiselle,” he said in a heavy accent. “I naturally assumed that since your brother speaks such excellent Hungarian, you would too.”

  “My brother speaks excellent Hungarian?” I pointed to Gray. “Do you mean this brother?”

  “Why, yes.” A look of bafflement crossed his face, no doubt matching the look on my face. “Did I misunderstand you?” he asked Gray. “Is this lovely girl not your sister?”

  Jakub had returned with the water as this confused exchange was taking place. His face too bore a look of bafflement as he set the glasses down amid the clutter of empty bottles and overfull ashtrays and took a seat next to me.

  Olé! cried Gray with a flourish of his hand, knocking over a wineglass in his exuberance. This outburst did nothing to clear up the confusion, but while I was staunching the tide of spilled wine with a napkin, Jakub deftly stepped in and explained I was actually Gray’s half sister. My clever husband also figured out how Gray had come by his knowledge of Hungarian.

  “It was your cradle language, wasn’t it?” he guessed, the language spoken by our father and Gray’s mother between themselves and the first language my brother had acquired, even if he’d had no occasion to use it beyond boyhood. In fact, Father once told me that Gray (whose given name was Géza) had insisted on being called Jimmy when he started first grade, the better to blend in with the American kids. He probably hadn’t uttered so much as a word in Hungarian in the decades since, but the language was lodged somewhere in that brain of his.

  “So why have I never heard you speak Hungarian until now?” I felt betrayed, as if he’d been holding out on me. Granted, we were born fifteen years apart and he was off at Yale by the time I was three. There was no reason why I should have been privy to the domestic details of his earliest years, but this particular detail felt like something I ought to have known.

  My brother shrugged. “Evidently I needed to be good and drunk.”

  “I’ve seen you drunk plenty of times,” I countered.

  “Drunk, yes. But never in the company of a handsome Hungarian.”

  Definitely the pálinka, I decided, but Gray wasn’t completely blotto. Belatedly remembering his manners, he introduced us to his tablemate, Ferenc Márkus, otherwise known as “Frankie,” a local stringer for one of the Western wire services. The two of them had been speaking Hungarian to prevent others—here Gray indicated Ames, his neighbor, with a jerk of his head—from overhearing.

  “No worries there,” Jakub murmured. Sprawled across the table like some bloated sea creature washed ashore, the British journalist was in no condition to absorb any information he might overhear, but as Frankie told us what he’d been telling Gray, I appreciated their circumspection.

  “Dr. Szabó is a specialist in children’s psychiatric disorders,” said Frankie. “Strictly speaking, the institution she runs is not an orphanage. The girls you saw have parents, but they’ve been interned.” He paused, to give us time to let this information sink in.

  “That can’t be easy,” I said, “having your parents taken from you.”

  Frankie agreed. “The girls have problems. Emotional problems. Bedwetting, nightmares, difficulty paying attention in school.” Some of them were too much for their relatives to handle, he went on to explain, but such was the stigma of being associated in any way with an accused enemy of the people that family members often refused to take in even the well-adjusted children—as if the trauma of losing their parents wasn’t bad enough.

  I knew only too well what it meant to lose a parent at a young age, how in a child’s mind everything took on significance. The characters in fairytales were always punished for their mistakes and there had been times when I blamed myself for Vivien’s death. Hansel and Gretel’s greed had gotten them locked up by the witch. In “Sleeping Beauty,” the princess was cursed by an evil fairy who someone had neglected to invite to the infant’s christening. What had I done to deserve my punishment? I spent an awful lot of time as a child trying to figure this out. Bad things happened for a reason. Everybody knew that. If I could just stop doing whatever it was I was being punished for, then I could undo the spell.

  That sad little girl still lives inside me, and each time I sing a melancholy song, or take on a tragic role, I draw on her sorrow. I’ve learned I can go into that lonely place and come out whole again, but I had a loving father and an older brother who’d always looked out for me. And needless to say, the Wentworth Academy was a far cry from a public institution like the children’s home. Even so, the girls had not seemed disturbed. In the short time I’d observed them playing in the courtyard, I’d seen no sign of distress. They seemed like perfectly normal children, which was saying a great deal as these were hardly normal times. Zoltán’s wife had come across as a forbidding figure when she’d confronted us earlier, but I now saw her fierceness as entirely warranted, if not admirable: the behavior of a mother bear defending her cubs. It was no small thing she’d managed to do, creating an oasis of calm amid the crisis, a safe haven where damaged children could still play as battles raged nearby.

  Jakub had been listening closely as Frankie described the home. I could tell he was trying to figure something out, some aspect of the situation that didn’t quite fit. “Dr. Szabó is employed by the state?” he asked.

  “Naturally.” Frankie was amused by the question. “There is no private enterprise here.”

  “And she has been running this home for how long?”

  “Oh, five or six years, I should think.”

  “How could the wife of an accused enemy of the people have been allowed to remain in charge of a facility like that? Wouldn’t she have fallen
under suspicion when her husband was arrested?”

  “Certainly, she was under suspicion.” Frankie’s lips turned up in the semblance of a smile, but there was no mirth behind it. Like József in the hospital, his feelings seemed to have disappeared from view, leaving behind a cardboard rendition of himself whose true opinions were impossible to discern. He seemed reluctant to elaborate any further in English, but Gray was able to get a bit more out of him by switching back to Hungarian.

  “Frankie’s sure the ÁVH kept an open file on both of them,” he told us later. “But Dr. Szabó might have been of more use to them right where she was. She might have led them unwittingly to other so-called enemies, if you catch my drift. They probably had an informant in the neighborhood who kept an eye on all the comings and goings at the home.”

  We were back in his room and it was well past midnight. Between the dancing, the late hour, and our fitful sleep the night before, Jakub and I were dead on our feet. We sat slumped together on one of the room’s narrow beds, struggling to keep our eyes open as Gray bounded about in his stocking feet, too keyed up to stay in one place. Alcohol made most people sleepy, but drinking, initially at least, had the opposite effect on my brother.

  I stifled a yawn. “That explains Dr. Szabó’s desire to get rid of us so quickly.” The more I learned about her, the more she grew in my estimation. She would have put up with the surveillance to preserve her little refuge. She seemed prepared to go to any lengths to protect her young charges, which raised a new question in my mind: “What if Zoltán were there the whole time and she didn’t want us to know?”

  “That makes no sense.” Gray plopped himself down on the opposite bed. “Why would she have been hiding him from us? We’re no threat to anyone.”